#so if you do these commands in Documents in Mint

[incohearent]

Downloading a webpage for reading in Okular (example) (Ubuntu)

1. sudo apt-get install okular 2. sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf 3. sudo apt-get install pdf2djvu 4. wkhtmltopdf -n -g https://boilingsteam.com/how-to-bridge-discord-in-matrix/ how_to_bridge_discord_in_matrix.pdf 5. pdf2djvu how_to_bridge_discord_in_matrix.pdf > how_to_bridge_discord_in_matrix.djvu

[gureumz]

coffee and mathematical physics

rating: explicit

member: jake

notes: fem!reader, university au, student council vp jake x student council secretary reader, a very speedy friends to lovers, clothed sex, spitting, shy jake 180-ing to dom!jake, unprotected sex

a/n: i really wanted to write something nasty for jake (tho i can get nastier than this wink wink) after hearing him ramble about quantum entanglement bc hello nerdy boys are so hot ugh so anyways enjoy!

the words in front of you are starting to blur and the only other thought in your mind is that you need coffee at the soonest time possible.

end-of-year reports were always a pain in the ass, especially for the student council secretary, which, by your luck, is you.

"sunoo, can we get someone to buy us coffee?" you ask, shuffling through the papers in your hands.

"we can ask jake. he's on his way," sunoo points out, taking a seat beside you. he types away furiously on his laptop, the click-clack of the keyboard grating against your ears.

"great," you grumble. "text him."

sunoo makes a sound akin to being offended. "the last time i checked, i was vice president for internal affairs, a rank higher than you."

you turn to sunoo, scowling. he's smiling, obviously having not taken your command to heart.

"okay, okay, i'll text him," sunoo soothes, patting you on the back.

you feel a heaviness in your head as you try your hardest to remember the order the documents have to be in.

annex a, then annex b, then annex c-1, annex c-2...wait, was there an annex b-2? what's that supposed to contain? officer info? council info?

your internal tirade against the university bureaucracy is interrupted when sunoo gasps, giggling right after.

"how sweet, jake's already bought coffee even before i told him to."

"classic jake," you supply, a hint of a smile on your lips.

jake, as the vice president for external affairs, was expected to be the outgoing and agreeable one. true to his job description, jake always made an effort to make sure everyone in the council's mental health was accounted for. he knew when jay was about to bust a vein (and how to prevent it from happening altogether), he can tell when sunoo's getting overwhelmed with university grievances, and jake always somehow knew when you needed a cup of coffee.

always. without fail. just as you were thinking about it, jake would offer you a trip to starbucks.

"he does this whole coffee thing for you, you know," sunoo points out, nudging you with his arm.

"he does not," you argue, slamming the clear book cover shut. you push the papers away from you, your temples throbbing and your eyes aching from the strain.

"he does," sunoo insists, closing his laptop as well. "he told me once how he'd never bought coffee for someone so many times until you started working together."

"i never told him to do that," you mumble, your cheeks heating in embarrassment. "i don't tell him to pay, either, but he does about half the time."

"he's so down bad for you," sunoo giggles, getting up. he packs away his laptop, rummaging around his bag.

"are you leaving already?" you question, disappointed, as you thought you'd have another set of eyes and hands to help you with the report.

sunoo nods, pouting apologetically. "i promised ni-ki we'd eat dinner together."

you make a face. "he's so down bad for you," you repeat, imitating sunoo's high-pitched teasing.

he laughs, swatting at your shoulder.

before any of you can get another word in, the door to the council room opens. in walks jake, a paper bag in hand, and his oh-so-dazzling smile plastered on his face.

"someone asked for coffee?" jake says, eyes meeting yours. you can't help but smile back at him, having known for quite some time that jake's smile was just that contagious.

"we did!" sunoo replies cheerily, skipping over to jake. the latter hands him a cup.

"the usual," jake informs. "mint choco frappe, albeit disgusting, is a must for our mint choco lover."

sunoo punches jake lightly on the arm.

"and for our hardworking secretary," jake begins, walking over to you at the table. "an iced caramel macchiato."

you accept the drink, thanking jake as you do so.

"so caring," you comment, giving him your sweetest smile. "my dream guy, indeed."

"and that's my cue to leave," sunoo declares, walking over to the door, his bag in hand.

"let me know if you need any help, ______! i'll get back to you as soon as i can," sunoo calls out as he pulls the door open, exiting swiftly, but not before shooting you a knowing glance over his shoulder.

jake, most likely oblivious to the exchange of looks, takes a seat beside you, rifling through the papers you had just organized moments ago.

"these all look in order," jake observes, tongue sticking out from the corner of his lips. you stare, albeit unintentionally, cursing inwardly at how attractive this little habit of his is.

not that you'd admit that jake was attractive, not out loud, at least. sure, he was extremely good-looking, with sharp eyes and an equally sharp nose, and lips that are to die for, not to mention that personality that toed the line between warm golden boy and reckless frat boy. you don't even want to get started on how he gets around girls, especially the pretty ones and—

"what else is missing?" jake asks, turning to you. you blink rapidly, trying to regain some coherent thoughts in your head, but the only thing you can focus on at the moment is how good jake smells.

"uh...," you begin lamely. jake grins, raising his eyebrows as he moves his face closer to yours, the same way you would when encouraging a child to tell you about their day.

"evaluation forms," you conclude, fidgeting with the hem of your skirt. "the evaluation forms from last year's events."

jake nods, turning away momentarily. he pulls his laptop out before powering it up.

"jungwon should have that covered, right? he's the one who audited and liquidated them, after all," jake wonders out loud as he types. your eyes drift down to his hands and an internal monologue threatens to fire up inside you once more.

"yeah," you reply, willing yourself to stare at his laptop screen instead. "i think he just hasn't come around to printing them, yet."

"but they should be in the drive," you add.

jake hums, focused on the task at hand. in the meantime, you busy yourself with your coffee, taking a long sip, and immediately feeling your headache ease up.

"thanks again for the coffee," you say, lightly bumping your shoulder against jake's.

jake turns to you, smiling. you stare at each other for a few seconds as you take another sip. after a while, jake chuckles.

"what?" you ask, fingers swiping at your cheek. "did i get something on my face?"

jake transitions to a full giggle before shaking his head. "no. it's just cute that you're drinking out of a cup with my name on it."

you cock your head to the side before turning the cup around. sure enough, jake's name is scribbled on the side. nothing unusual, seeing as he was the one that ordered your drink.

"okay...?"

"nothing, it's nothing," jake says with a shake of his head.

"no, tell me," you insist, pulling on jake's wrist. he giggles some more, turning away from you in an attempt to hide his face.

"jakeeee," you whine, tugging on his arm. he meets your gaze, and it's only then you notice just how close he's gotten.

"okay, don't get weirded out, but like, imagine if i posted a story of you drinking from that cup," jake explains, gesturing to the drink in your hand. you nod, your curiosity building.

"and it has my name on full display. and you're drinking from it. the cup, with my name on it," jake continues, eyebrows raised once more as he gesticulates broadly with his hands, as if trying to get an obvious point across.

"and? is that supposed to mean anything?" you question, crossing your arms in front of you.

"i guess? i mean—well, i don't know!" jake stammers, collapsing into another fit of his adorable giggles. you laugh along, genuinely lost at what he's trying to get at.

"what, is it supposed to come off as like some romantic gesture that you bought coffee for me?" you ask, not expecting any particular answer, but jake's face blanks out at your words, his mouth opening and closing as if trying to find the right words.

"i mean, yeah," jake says timidly.

"but, you buy coffee for everyone on the council," you point out.

"because i didn't want to seem so obvious," jake admits, scratching at the back of his neck. you stare at him for a moment, unsure of where this is going.

"obvious? obvious about what?"

jake sighs, wiping his hands on his pants. "that i was trying to impress you with the coffee."

your eyes widen almost comically at this admission. jake was trying to impress you?

"you didn't have to do all that," you protest, suddenly guilty at how oblivious you've been. in your defense, you didn't want to read into it too much, if at all, for that matter.

"but, we're having this conversation now, so i guess it worked," jake says with a shrug. silence washes over the two of you as you try to think of what to say next.

"sorry," jake mumbles, clearly embarrassed.

"what? no! it's cute. you're cute," you blurt out and jake catches onto the last sentence, eyebrows almost shooting off his forehead.

"no, for real," you continue in a rush. "it's very sweet of you, jake."

jake grins, unable to hide the blush blossoming on his neck and ears. you feel your own face warm up.

"right," jake replies, clearing his throat. "it's nothing, really, i mean, i was gonna ask you out eventually, but—well, i wasn't really sure when, it's just—"

jake cuts himself off, covering his face with both his hands.

"god, sorry, what do i even say to that?" jake complains, laughing, obviously too embarrassed to speak.

you laugh, reaching over to pull his hands off his face. he looks at you with wide, puppy-dog eyes and you're convinced you've never seen anything as adorable as jake in this moment.

"relax," you say as you take jake's hands in yours. you set your coffee cup down. "tell you what, let's just put that conversation away for now."

you pull your chair closer to jake's, your knees knocking against his. you thread your fingers between his own, turning your full attention to him.

"tell me about your day instead," you suggest, laying your other hand on your clasped ones. jake seems to visibly relax at this, squeezing your hand.

"okay," jake begins hesitantly. "well, i had one class today, which was mathematical physics."

you nod, encouraging him to go on.

"i don't wanna bore you with the specifics, so...," jake warns, seemingly unsure of whether to continue or not.

"you could never bore me," you reply, smiling. jake's whole face turns red this time and he can't help the peals of laughter that erupt from his lips.

"you can't say stuff like that," jake says with a pout. "you just can't!"

you grin, amused at jake's flustered state. "okay, okay, i won't. please, tell me about mathematical physics."

jake clears his throat again, cheeks still a shade of pink. "right, so it's a class that i really enjoy because, if you didn't know already, i love math and physics, so this is like their genius lovechild or something."

you nod, leaning closer to jake. if he notices, he doesn't say anything.

"it's mostly just theory since it bases on the mathematical foundation of theoretical physics," jake pauses. "duh jake, theoretical physics, so, of course, it's mostly theory."

you snicker at his little side commentary.

"so yeah, we had a lecture today, and not going into specifics again since you probably wouldn't understand much of it anyway, we touched on statistical mechanics."

you nod along, and as much as you hate to admit it, you've tuned out most of what jake's saying, too focused on the way his face lights up and shifts as he explains. he still uses his hands as he goes along, even the one that's holding yours.

it's cute.

you don't realize that he's stopped talking until he suddenly laughs, getting closer to your face.

"you're not listening, are you?" jake challenges, grinning mischievously.

you stutter for a few seconds, mentally kicking yourself because you're the one who convinced him to talk about his day and you're not going to listen to him in the end?

it's your turn to be embarrassed as he lets go of your hand in favor of resting his arm on your chair behind you, circling it around your shoulders.

"sorry," you murmur, a sudden warmth spreading over you. "i don't really care about physics. i just wanna hear you talk about it."

jake smiles. "oh?"

"yeah," you nod, shifting closer to him. you swing your legs over to rest on his lap, meaning it to be a wholesome gesture, just something to bring you physically closer to him.

jake doesn't seem as flustered now because he catches your legs, tucking his forearm behind your knees before pulling you completely off your chair and onto his thighs. his other arm supports your waist now, leaving you seated sideways on his lap.

your skirt has flipped outward and you were now sitting your bare ass on jake.

"you're such a nerd," you comment with a laugh, circling your arms around jake's neck. his eyes flick up and down between your eyes and lips.

you get the message.

"a hot nerd, i hope?" jake asks, tilting his head to the side.

"the hottest," you confirm before leaning in to press your lips to his.

jake groans, fingers curling into the material of your blouse as he pulls you even closer. you part your lips, his other hand delicately tucking strands of hair behind your ear. he grips one side of your face right after, angling his own head in order to kiss you even deeper.

your own hands find purchase in his perfectly gelled hair, the soft strands gliding in between your fingers. something about jake walking out of this room with messed up hair because of you sends a jolt of excitement through your body.

"sit on me, baby," jake requests, pulling away. he's panting, eyes dark as he looks at you with want.

"i already am," you say with a hint of confusion.

"you know what i mean," jake says, voice gruff as his hands grab your waist, maneuvering you around. you hurriedly slide off his lap, but only for a second.

you straddle jake, your thin lace underwear and his cotton sweatpants the only barriers between your heated core and his hard-on.

you swivel your hips forward experimentally and the friction has you moaning. jake throws his head back, bottom lip caught between his teeth.

you continue your movements at a steady pace, the only sounds coming from both of your labored breathing. it should be embarrassing how you're like a couple of horny teenagers just humping each other at school of all places, but neither of you has the capacity to care at the moment.

jake reaches under your skirt from behind, palms smoothing over your ass before he grabs at your cheeks, controlling your movements.

"fuck yeah," he curses under his breath, looking up at you through his long lashes. you reach down, undoing jake's button-up, all the way down to the last button, exposing his toned chest and abs.

"get off" jake whispers. "bend over the desk."

you inhale, practically scrambling off jake's lap. you do as you're told, pressing your upper body against the table, documents and all, exposing your ass to jake.

he flips your skirt over, dragging your panties down until they fall at your ankles. you step out of them, kicking them off to the side. you squeal when you feel jake's fingers running up and down between your folds, coating himself with your wetness.

"who knew a few cups of coffee over the course of a semester would lead to this," jake says, slipping a finger in. you bite your lip, trying to conceal the sounds that threaten to escape your lips.

jake adds another. "spread wide open for me."

jake slowly drags his fingers in and out of you and you have to clamp a hand down on your mouth. you clench around the thick digits, the pad of jake's thumb ghosting over your puckered rim. he teases it ever-so-slightly and you can't stop the whimper that leaves you.

jake covers the lower half of your face with his large hand. "sshh," jake coos in your ear as he leans down. "don't want anyone to discover the student council vice president and secretary getting it on in the council room now, do we?"

you shake your head, grabbing at jake's wrist. you mumble against his palm, but it comes out a garbled mess of words. he seems to take pity on you because he removes his hand momentarily to let you speak.

"please," you try to say as quietly as you can, despite jake's fingers shoved deep inside you. "fuck me, please."

you turn to look at jake and it's like all traces of the previous jake are gone. his face is serious but a dark glint is in his eyes, and you somehow know you're about to get fucked within an inch of your life.

jake forces your head down on the table, your cheek smushing against the smooth plastic. jake removes his fingers from inside you, leaving you clenching around nothing. you hear a wet pop and you immediately know he's helping himself to your arousal.

"delicious, babe," jake comments, leaning down to plant a kiss on your temple.

"if anything gets too much, our safe word is 'coffee'," jake reminds, kissing you again, this time on the cheek that isn't being pressed against the desk.

jake lets go of you for a second, but you don't dare move, both afraid and exhilarated at the idea of what might happen if you do. you hear rustling from behind you and you know jake has pulled his pants down.

you turn to take a peek and what you see has your mouth watering.

jake is of a highly commendable size. you'd say around 6 inches from where you're looking and girthy.

jake catches you staring and he snickers, giving his cock a few pumps.

"like what you see, sweetheart?" jake asks, thumbing at the precum spilling from his tip.

"yeah," you breathe out. "can't wait to have it inside me."

jake chuckles lowly. "no need to wait, baby."

jake rubs the length of your core once, twice, before pushing right in. a sound between a groan and a sigh escapes you, the feeling of fullness hitting you head-on.

"fuck," jake curses. "fuck yes."

jake starts to move, pulling out almost all the way before plunging back in. he goes in so deep, it. has your head spinning. you lay there, splayed out against the work you were poring over merely half an hour ago, wondering if the office would accept cumstained documents.

"up," jake commands. it takes you a second but you manage to hold yourself up with trembling arms, the desk's mechanical creaking loud inside the room.

jake takes hold of your neck his other arm wrapping around your waist. he pulls you flush against him, thrusting up shallowly into your dripping pussy.

"good girl," jake croons in your ear. he tightens his fingers around your airway. "you're my good girl, right?"

you let out a sound, unable to find proper words to confirm that, yes, you're his good girl and you'd do anything he asks of you, whatever it is he wants, you'd gladly do it.

your meek whimpers turn into a whine of protest when you feel jake pull out. he leans over, shoving papers and other things to the very edge of the desk. some papers flutter off the table completely but both of you fail to notice.

"lie down," jake instructs, pushing you towards the desk. you turn around, hoisting yourself up on the desk before laying down as jake had said.

jake enters you again, resuming his previous pace. pressure builds up inside of you, your eyes rolling into the back of your head with every brush of jake's cock against that one spot within.

"open," jake's voice cuts through the haze in your mind. you blink at him, unsure of what he's asking you to do. he makes a sound of impatience, grabbing your jaw.

"open your mouth," jake says, leaning over. you part your lips and jake aligns his face above yours. he gathers spit between his lips and before you can register what he's doing, he lets the liquid fall right into your awaiting mouth.

"swallow," jake orders, forcing your mouth shut. you oblige, your whole body flushing at the filth he's making you do.

jake speeds up his movements, seemingly satisfied. you gasp, grabbing onto jake's arm. he's holding onto your hips as if you were nothing, his grip on you so tight, like he might fling you around with no problem at all. he's fucking you like a man starved and you're loving every second of it.

"g-gonna cum," you whimper, fingers clumsily rubbing at your clit in an attempt to bring you closer to your orgasm.

"yeah?" jake responds. "gonna cum all over my cock, hm?"

you nod frantically, back arching off the table as you feel it approach.

"come on baby, cum all over this cock," jake eggs on. "so fucking hot, baby, cumming from this cock alone."

you cry out, a wave of pleasure crashing into you. your mouth hangs wide open, breathing labored as euphoria grips you from every side.

you hear jake groan from above you and you watch as your orgasm is fading away, jake pulling out and pumping his cock furiously. he finishes all over your exposed cunt, some of his cum staining your skirt.

yours and jake's breathing comes out loud, both of you spent from the harsh fucking you just did.

"fuck," jake mutters, rubbing his softening dick all over your swollen pussy. "that's hot."

you laugh breathlessly, propping yourself up on your elbows. jake looks at you, immediately bursting into laughter.

"well, damn," jake says, pulling back to survey the scene in front of him.

"that's one pretty picture if i've ever seen one," jake concludes, giving you a thumbs up.

you roll your eyes, peeking down to assess the mess you both made.

"shut up and help me clean up," you tease good-naturedly, sliding off the desk. jake smiles, leaning in to peck your lips.

"of course, my ever-so-hardworking secretary."

[denaliwrites]

Say My Name

Cale Erendreich x GN!Reader

Catch and Release Prompt: "Orbit"

Summary: When your whole life centers on Cale, you can't help but learn things about him.

Soundtrack: Say My Name by Destiny's Child

Requests: Open!

Warnings: It's Cale Erendreich, I know what y'all are here for.

You hadn't meant to learn so many secrets about your boyfriend -- you supposed now that was a moot point though, as the damage had been done. You'd learned too much, way too much, and it would surely be the end of you.

He'd caught you, was the biggest problem.

You'd been up in the attic, looking for something specific -- you couldn't even remember what, now, could only remember that it had decidedly not been what you'd found instead.

One wrong turn and you'd unsuspectingly bumped into a precariously placed box, and out had spilled countless documents, pictures, newspaper clippings. Among other things.

But the one thing that caught your attention above all others was a picture of a twelve year old boy -- unmistakably your boyfriend, you could tell by his eyes -- that was labeled "Damien Valkenberg, 1983."

The floorboards creaked behind you, telling you that he'd heard the box fall and come to investigate. You felt a tear stream down your cheek, but you weren't sure why.

"You weren't supposed to find that," his voice sounded from behind you.

Your own was choked when you replied with a simple, quiet, "Why?"

"There are a lot of things you don't know about me. It's safer for you not to know them."

You didn't miss the way those words sounded, the way he'd turned them into a threat.

He moved quietly when he wanted to -- you'd seen him before, creeping predatorily in order to surprise friends or sneak the two of you into places you shouldn't be, harmless things like a movie.

But you'd never thought it'd be turned on you, that you'd be the one being stalked. Yet, the soft tread of his shoes, try as he might to make it imperceptible, was unmistakable to you.

You'd spent so long orbiting Cale Erendreich, stuck in his undeniable, inescapable pull. You supposed it was only a matter of time before he consumed you -- the inevitable crash and burn of unstable gravity. A planet flying much too close to the sun.

When you turned, he lunged.

You were easily pinned to the ground, and while every instinct told you to struggle and scream, you refused to give him the satisfaction.

He stared down at you with animalistic eyes -- a feral intent to hunt and kill, and you stared up at him with calm acceptance. What else could you do? Beg? Bargain? He'd made up his mind, it was clear in his gaze.

"Say my name."

You blinked, pulled out of your readiness by his inexplicable command.

Stunned, you stammered, "C-Cale...?"

"My real name."

You wondered what his game was. If the look in his eyes, subtly shifted to something more playful (but definitely still deadly), was anything to go by, then there was absolutely a game being played.

"D... Damien?" you guessed.

You gasped as his hand suddenly struck your throat, cutting off all air. You realized, dimly, that while it was impossible for it to be his namesake, he was rather like Damien from the Omen -- able to be sickly sweet when it served him, but ultimately deeply and irrevocably evil underneath.

You were cognizant enough to worry that'd be your last thought, only for air to just as suddenly fill your lungs as Cale's --

Damien's --

hand released you so that he could pull you up into a brutal kiss that left you not just feeling but somehow even tasting your narrowly avoided demise.

It tasted like mint with a hint of honey and lavender -- the tea you'd made him only an hour ago.

"Don't tell anyone," he commanded.

You nodded numbly, stars still dancing in your eyes. "Yes, sir."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

All the books I reviewed in 2023 (Graphic Novels)

Next Tuesday (December 5), I'm at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC, with my new solarpunk novel The Lost Cause, which 350.org's Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel: perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful."

It's that time of year again, when I round up all the books I reviewed for my newsletter in the previous year. I posted 21 reviews last year, covering 31 books (there are two series in there!). I also published three books of my own last year (two novels and one nonfiction). A busy year in books!

Every year, these roundups remind me that I did actually manager to get a lot of reading done, even if the list of extremely good books that I didn't read is much longer than the list of books I did read. I read many of these books while doing physiotherapy for my chronic pain, specifically as audiobooks I listened to on my underwater MP3 player while doing my daily laps at the public pool across the street from my house.

After many years of using generic Chinese waterproof MP3s players – whose quality steadily declined over a decade – I gave up and bought a brand-name player, a Shokz Openswim. So far, I have no complaints. Thanks to reader Abbas Halai for recommending this!

https://shokz.com/products/openswim

I load up this gadget with audiobook MP3s bought from Libro.fm, a fantastic, DRM-free alternative to Audible, which is both a monopolist and a prolific wage-thief with a documented history of stealing from writers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

All right, enough with the process notes, on to the reviews!

GRAPHIC NOVELS

I. Shubiek Lubiek by Deena Mohamed

An intricate alternate history in which wishes are real, and must be refined from a kind of raw wish-stuff that has to be dug out of the earth. Naturally, this has been an important element of geopolitics and colonization, especially since the wish-stuff is concentrated in the global south, particularly Egypt, the setting for our tale. The framing device for the trilogy is the tale of three "first class" wishes: these are the most powerful wishes that civilians are allowed to use, the kind of thing you might use to cure cancer or reverse a crop-failure.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/11/your-wish/#is-my-command

II. Ducks by Kate Beaton

In 2005, Beaton was a newly minted art-school grad facing a crushing load of student debt, a debt she would never be able to manage in the crumbling, post-boom economy of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Like so many Maritimers, she left the home that meant everything for her to travel to Alberta, where the tar sands oil boom promised unmatched riches for anyone willing to take them. Beaton's memoir describes the following four years, as she works her way into a series of oil industry jobs in isolated company towns where men outnumber women 50:1 and where whole communities marinate in a literally toxic brew of carcinogens, misogyny, economic desperation and environmental degradation. The story that follows is – naturally – wrenching, but it is also subtle and ambivalent. Beaton finds camaraderie with – and empathy for – the people she works alongside, even amidst unimaginable, grinding workplace harassment that manifests in both obvious and glancing ways.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/14/hark-an-oilpatch/#kate-beaton

III. Justice Warriors by Matt Bors

Justice Warriors is what you'd get if you put Judge Dredd in a blender with Transmetropolitan and set it to chunky. The setup: the elites of a wasted, tormented world have retreated into Bubble City, beneath a hermetically sealed zone. Within Bubble City, everything is run according to the priorities of the descendants of the most internet-poisoned freaks of the modern internet, click- and clout-chasing mushminds full of corporate-washed platitudes about self-care, diversity and equity, wrapped around come-ons for sugary drinks and dubious dropshipper crapola. It's a cop buddy-story dreamed up by Very Online, very angry creators who live in a present-day world where reality is consistently stupider than satire.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/22/libras-assemble/#the-uz

IV. Roaming by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

The story of three young Canadian women meeting up for a getaway to New York City. Zoe and Dani are high-school best friends who haven't seen each other since they graduated and decamped for universities in different cities. Fiona is Dani's art-school classmate, a glamorous and cantankerous artist with an affected air of sophistication. It's a dizzying, beautifully wrought three-body problem as the three protagonists struggle with resentments and love, sex and insecurity. The relationships between Zoe, Dani and Fiona careen wildly from scene to scene and even panel to panel, propelled by sly graphic cues and fantastically understated dialog.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/11/as-canadian-as/#possible-under-the-circumstances

Like I said, this has been a good year in books for me, and it included three books of my own:

I. Red Team Blues (novel, Tor Books US, Head of Zeus UK)

Martin Hench is 67 years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He lives and roams California in a very comfortable fully-furnished touring bus, The Unsalted Hash, that he bought years ago from a fading rock star. He knows his way around good food and fine drink. He likes intelligent women, and they like him back often enough. Martin is a—contain your excitement—self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He’s as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he’s a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike. He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. Now he’s been roped into a job that’s more dangerous than anything he’s ever agreed to before—and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

II. The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (nonfiction, Verso)

We can – we must – dismantle the tech platforms. We must to seize the means of computation by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users to leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission. Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet.

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

III. The Lost Cause (novel, Tor Books US, Head of Zeus UK)

For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn't controversial. It's just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programs cannot be stopped in their tracks.

But there are still those Americans, mostly elderly, who cling to their red baseball caps, their grievances, their huge vehicles, their anger. To their "alternative" news sources that reassure them that their resentment is right and pure and that "climate change" is just a giant scam. And they're your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. And they're not going anywhere. And they’re armed to the teeth. The Lost Cause asks: What do we do about people who cling to the belief that their own children are the enemy? When, in fact, they're often the elders that we love?

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

I wrote nine books during lockdown, and there's plenty more to come. The next one is The Bezzle, a followup to Red Team Blues, which comes out in February:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

While you're waiting for that one, I hope the reviews above will help you connect with some excellent books. If you want more of my reviews, here's my annual roundup from 2022:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/01/bookishness/#2022-in-review

Here's my book reviews from 2021:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/08/required-ish-reading/#bibliography

And here's my book reviews from 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#recommended-reading

It's EFF's Power Up Your Donation Week: this week, donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation are matched 1:1, meaning your money goes twice as far. I've worked with EFF for 22 years now and I have always been - and remain - a major donor, because I've seen firsthand how effective, responsible and brilliant this organization is. Please join me in helping EFF continue its work!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/01/bookmaker/#2023-in-review

[otherworldseekers]

Rarepair Week Day 2: Trophy | Lover's Token

A little bit of Severia x Nero writing from the Enemies and Lovers AU.

“Where have you been?”

Nero glanced up from his reports at the sound of the strident voice and the figure that strode uninvited into his office. “Dear Livia, have many times now have I asked you to knock?”

“I am here at my Lord Baelsar’s request,” his junior officer said. 

“And I suppose with thoughts of our magnificent commander on your mind, you quite forgot what courtesy is,” Nero replied. With a sigh he set down the file he had been reading and turned to his insistent visitor. “Very well, what is it?”

“Lord Baelsar demands to know what took you away from your work here for such a long period,” Livia proclaimed. Nero suspected she was even smirking under her helmet. 

“Other work,” Nero answered. “Baelsar is quite aware that I am doing the jobs of three men. If he is so anxious to have his Weapon completed he should find someone else to manage the Frumentarium. Oh, that’s right, there’s no one else with the intelligence required.” He gave her a pointed look. “The least you could do, Livia, if you truly want to see his wishes granted, is to take over some of my busy work.”

He reached across his desk for a messy pile of papers and dropped them on the floor at her feet. “You have said you would do anything for our Lord, have you not?” 

Nero picked up the report she had interrupted and turned away, hiding his smug smile as she fumed beneath her armor. But eventually she gathered the scattered documents and stomped from the room, slamming the door behind her. Nero chuckled to himself. She really was too easy to manage. Her ridiculous obsession with the Legatus was her weakness of course. She would have been far more resilient if only she would give up on him. But she never would. The fool. 

A small metal box that sat on the corner of Nero’s desk caught his eye. His newest trophy. Setting the report down once more, he took up the box and lifted the lid. A familiar fragrance wafted from the container. Gingerly he picked up the somewhat worn cake of soap from the box and held it to his nose. Strawberries and mint, an unusual combination, and only a part of her unique scent. 

Severia Zetsuen. His secret. The true reason he had spent so much time away from the Castrum of late. 

Nero smiled to himself as he recalled their most recent encounter. She had been shy and hesitant at first. Under normal circumstances he found that sort of thing tiresome, but with this woman some answering instinct rose up in him and told him she was worth the care and effort she required. And when the waves of her passion had risen up and crashed over both of them… Well, even with his experience, he had never felt anything quite like it. 

Later, he had taken the opportunity to avail himself of some little token of hers. A cursory search of her pack had revealed the used cake of soap wrapped in oil cloth. Its fragrance wrapped around him, the scent of her skin before their exertions, and he knew he must have it. 

Now, returning the little cake to its hiding place, he wondered if that had been wise. The urge to take it out and breath in its unique perfume was persistent. He found himself wondering when next he might arrange a meeting and considering ways to stall his work further. But he reminded himself it was all part of his grand plan. Nero might take his time and pleasure with her for now, but ultimately she was just another tool in his box. 

Nothing would change that.

[zoeythebee]

Since you use Arch:

1) What made you choose Arch?

2) How hard is it to use?

3) If you do that, how hard is it to dual boot with Arch?

(I think many/maybe most Linux OS have documentation, but I'm not very familiar with Arch other than the memes. My main debugging skills are looking stuff up and asking people, in that order)

(The 3 distros on top of my to-try list are Debian, Mint, and Arch. I'd be delighted to have a reason to put one of them higher on the list.)

1. The size of the repository. With the AUR plus the already large official repository practically every program no matter how niche is one command away. And also the documentation is fucking incredible. I've been trying out Debian lately but honestly I might switch back because its repository sucks (latest neovim version is 6.x????) And the documentation is awfulllll.

2. Just as easy as every other distro. Also since you set up the environment you can tune it to your need. I tend to work exclusively through a terminal so I rock a super minimal setup.

Setup can be kinda tricky, installing is a process but the guide is very easy to follow, and there is also the archinstall script that makes the process way way simpler.

Setting up your environment is a rabbit hole but it's mostly installing programs and setting then up. You can install a display manager and KDE and have a totally fine easy to use experience with next to how effort. And while setting up I can practically guarantee the wiki has a detailed page with all the info you may need.

TL;DR the install process can be complex, setting up a desktop environment is super easy, and using it is very easy.

3. Dual Booting is either super simple. Or genuinely the hardest thing you can do with linux. If you dont mind manually opening the bios and switching the boot source to switch its easy.

If you want to be able to launch windows from GRUB without opening the bios prepare for hell on earth. When I tried it, it took a week and I never got it to work. And it's very easy to fuck up your boot loader and fixing that is extremely difficult with few resources online.

I personally

[0x00000010]

0x5E1F1E

i released an experimental artwork that allows the viewer to create collaborations with me in realtime and mint the resulting 1/1 artworks on tezos

it takes in your camera stream through a DOS/ASCII style filter created by 0x10 and there are some controls where you can configure colours and character sets

when you're happy with the creation you can press mint and a preview of the final artwork will be displayed. this is where you can add a title and description for the token

all minted artworks appear in the collection on objktcom and rarible and are marked as collaborations between the minter and 0x10

on-chain artworks and viewer

each artwork has a 100% on-chain ASCII version that is stored alongside the artwork on the blockchain and can be used to reconstruct the artwork without ipfs

for this we pay per byte, so there is an associated storage cost for each selfie that increases depending on the complexity of the final output - the more colours, characters, and overall noise in the scene the higher the on-chain storage costs

i created an accompanying token viewer application which is also 100% on-chain, and this came with a whole heap of problems i had to figure out in order to achieve

it can be installed via a single terminal command available inside the artwork. the same command is minted at typed.art/8280

running the command installs and optionally opens a local viewer app. this app is extremely basic because it was written from scratch, by hand, and optimised to fit inside a single tezos blockchain transaction, which also brought about a lot of limitations i had to get around to achieve this part of the artwork

technical information

the artwork consists of 6 smart contracts. 3 of them are utility contracts that do things like checking signatures, domains, and token balances, and the other 3 are the mintery, the on-chain asset storage, and the tokens themselves

when you access the site for the first time you need to request a "mint access token"

this token is an NFT that will appear in your wallet from the mintery contract, and is your key to minting selfies. it's not possible to call the minting functionality without this special access token in your wallet

you also require a tezos domain linked to the wallet. both the tezos domain and the mint access token are used to create a unique signature that gets signed and attached the each mint request and gets verified on-chain during the mint process as part of a bot-resistant proof-of-concept minting technique

fun facts

the entire artwork is to be considered a self-portrait of 0x10

the artwork is 100% web3 - there are no servers, the primary artwork site is hosted on ipfs with the dns running through the linked tezos domain page (0x5E1F1E.tez.page)

i initially created the entire artwork to use gzip compression for storing the on-chain data and then at the very end when i was writing the on-chain viewer i could not fit my gzip decompression code into a single blockchain transaction, so had to scrap and re-implement the entire engine using a basic LZW implementation instead of gzip to achieve my goal of having a self-contained transparent on-chain viewer application that fits into a single transaction

there is a super-secret glitch mode hidden inside the artwork that can lead to some pretty amazing creations - however, the complexity of the final results can lead to very expensive storage costs for the on-chain versions of glitched creations and they can even deviate slightly from the original (below example would cost over 5tz in on-chain storage alone)

there's on-chain documentation for reconstructing a selfie from the raw on-chain data

the hex representation of the red colour in the access token and logo is #5E1F1E

there is an upper max limit of 0x5E1F1E (6168350) selfies available

you may use outputs from 0x5E1F1E or even 0x5E1F1E itself as an input into new artworks provided attribution of some sort to either 0x5E1F1E or 0x10 is included with the new artwork

my versum genesis is one of my earliest glitch-mode outputs created while i was developing selfie

i had fun making this artwork, i hope you have fun using it, and i look forward to seeing more creations

[autolenaphilia]

LMDE 6 Beta First impressions.

I've been trying out the Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 public beta for little over a day now, and I have no complaints or bugs so far. LMDE is the version of Linux Mint that is based directly on Debian rather than Ubuntu, unlike the mainline Mint distro. LMDE 6, "Faye", is based on Debian 12. The point is to become as similar in features as the regular Ubuntu version. And it exists as a Plan B in case Ubuntu disappears or becomes unuseable as a base for Mint.

And It's good that this safety plan exists, because Canonical and Ubuntu are not that reliable. The Mint devs has had to rebel against Canonical's decisions multiple times, creating work for them. The Mint documentation has an entire page criticizing Canonical's preferred package format, Snap and why it's not included by default in Mint. The version of Firefox included in Mint is packaged by the devs themselves, since the Ubuntu version of Firefox is a snap (and if you try to install it via Apt, it will install a snap package instead). And ubuntu is moving more and more towards snaps, including an immutable all-snap Ubuntu. If that becomes the default Ubuntu release, derivative distros that don't use snap are pretty much finished.

I started my Linux journey with Mint, but moved upstream to Debian for awhile precisely because I was not comfortable with my operating system standing on such unsure ground. And unlike most Ubuntu-based distros (of which there are many), it's smart of the Mint team to realize that and create LMDE as a plan B. And now I'm on LMDE, because well that moves my computer off Ubuntu, while also enabling me to support Mint, which remains such an important part of the LInux ecosystem for being so beginner-friendly.

So how it is as a distro? How does it compare to mainline Ubuntu? and what does it add to its Debian base?

LMDE uses Debian stable, and as such the packages are outdated, but it's rocksolid stable. I'm running the beta, and because it's debian-based, the majority of the packages were well-tested by the time Debian 12 was released. So I haven't found any bugs so far. And Mint includes flatpaks by default, so you can get newer software in sandboxed containers without sacrificing overall system stability.

Mint adds to the basic Debian experience in many ways, the main addition is the many GUI tools Mint has developed. The software manager handles both debs and flatpaks by default with a slick interface. And the update manager handles updates with friendly non-pushy notifications, I've sang its praises before. Mint also provides tools to manage your software sources (to switch to a local mirror for example) and to create a backup of your home folder.

These tools are what make Mint so famously easy to use, as I written about before. For most common use cases, you never need to see the command line. It's similar to what MX Linux adds to Debian, which I've written about here. I think Mint probably has better looking and more intuitive GUI design than the MX equivalents, although the MX tools have more features. They are both great.

KDE Plasma and Gnome desktops does add somewhat similar functionality to base Debian, but I have reasons not to use those DEs. Gnome lacks customizability and forces a particular workflow, while I found Plasma to be a complete crashfest.

I ended up using xfce, which best met my needs, it's lightweight, easy to use and stable. And I didn't want to pollute it by pulling in bits of other desktops with all its dependencies. It did however require me to use the command line for things like installing and updating flatpaks, and i found running "sudo apt update" and "sudo apt upgrade" easier than using synaptic. I had figured out the command line by that point, so I could make do without the functionality of Mint, but the Mint tools are great to have. Having update notifications is great for an absent-minded person like me.

And they are sometimes objectively better than their Debian equivalents. For example the software sources manager that is in the Debian repos has been broken for months with a bug that leaves your apt.sources.list in a broken state that cuts your OS off from security updates, something I discovered the hard way and I had to manually edit my sources.list to fix it. The Mint equivalent works perfectly fine.

There is a lot of polish for desktop users In LMDE compared to base debian. It does add a lot of value that way.

How is it compared to ubuntu-based Mint (LMUE) though? And as someone who used LMUE cinnamon for months, I have to say the majority of functionality is all there. My experience is basically the same.

The only thing missing I could find is the driver manager, which can be very useful as it detects missing hardware drivers and pulls them in from either online or the installation media. The driver manager is to my understanding tied into Ubuntu's repos for additional drivers. Ubuntu has some of the best hardware support in the LInux distro world. Debian however has compromised their commitment to free software in favor of practicality, and now includes non-free drivers with their installation media by default, so maybe that functionality is not that necessary anymore. I've had no problems with wi-fi and blu-ray drivers on this laptop I'm typing this on, even with base Debian.

Another thing missing in LMDE is a choice of desktop environments by default. You only get cinnamon, the flagship DE developed by the Mint devs primarily for MInt. LMUE also offers Mate and Xfce by default. This is because LMDE is a "Plan B", and supporting multiple DEs on a second base would mean a too heavy workload for the devs. The Debian repos does however have Mate and Xfce in its massive package selection, plus several more DEs, and you can install them manually If you want, and still use the MInt tools, I tried it with xfce myself.

As a derivate distro, LMDE does also drag behind Debian releases quite a bit, when a new Debian drops it takes awhile for Mint to develop an LMDE version based on it. LMDE 6 was a quick turnaround by LMDE standards and it still took like three months after Debian 12's release. LMUE's turnaround for Ubuntu LTS releases is far quicker, because it remains a relative priority for the devs.

Still LMDE 6 is here now, and it's a great distro. It proves that Linux Mint is not relaint on Ubuntu, and adds useful functionalities to its Debian base.

[synthcryptid]

The thing about Linux is that it's in a perpetual double-bind.

The average user is advised to stay away from it due to devs not prioritizing end-user friendliness, while devs are discouraged from prioritizing user-friendliness due to the low proportion of average users. This is compounded by the fact that average users don't really stay average after prolonged use of Linux (Because let's face it, if you use Linux as a daily driver for long enough, you're gonna end up learning the basics of at least several programming languages)

Though it doesn't help matters much that outside knowledge of Linux is... Incredibly out of date, and legitimately exaggerated? People still unironically recommend Ubuntu, for instance, even though it's fairly well-known within the Linux community that Ubuntu is incredibly user-hostile, among many other issues. Software compatibility's another thing, where it's fairly common for those who don't use Linux to claim that software compatibility is incredibly poor when that simply isn't the case nowadays (It requires active hostility on the dev's end for a game or program to not run under Linux nowadays. This is predominantly an issue with software developed by large corporations)

Then there's the techbros who view the act of using Linux as prestigious, who outwardly flout it as being challenging to use, etc, when that really isn't the case. It's especially egregious with Arch, in which techbros often tout the installation process as being difficult, when the reality is that it's essentially a litmus test for whether you're in the target audience that most Linux devs aim for. If you can read a manual, use a terminal, code, and are comfortable with doing those first two things on a regular basis, then there's a very high chance you'll find Linux incredibly easy to use (especially Arch!). Techbros grow defensive when you say that out loud.

With all these things combined, the average user ends up being pretty scared by the thought of using Linux, and understandably so, even with those things being quite unreasonable on paper. Linux is as good an OS as you are with computers, but the issue is that average users are... Distinctly not good with computers, but don't have much reason to build their tech-literacy when the alternative is an OS that theoretically does everything they need (albeit opaquely, entirely behind the scenes, and with hostility towards attempts to change anything about how it works. Windows is not a good OS, but since it caters to the average user, it ends up being far more palatable for the average user despite the active hostility towards slightly more advanced use cases. That hostility in turn contributes to the misconception of things like the command line being hard to use)

We suppose we don't have any particular moral to conclude this wall of text with. But hey, if you're tech-literate and are growing tired with Windows? Consider setting up a VM of your choice, and trying out a few Linux distros! EndeavourOS, Linux Mint, and Arch Linux, are the three distros we can wholeheartedly recommend for someone who's tech-literate, and curious about dipping their toes into Linux. Now, Windows as a VM host is pretty awful in terms of performance, especially Windows 11, but it's an environment that's more than enough to see how well you vibe with Linux as a desktop OS. Just remember to keep Arch's wiki on-hand for quick reference (even if you aren't using Arch or an Arch-based distro! Arch's wiki provides incredible documentation for Linux in general.)

[lasclstart]

How to install java on mac youtube.com

HOW TO INSTALL JAVA ON MAC YOUTUBE.COM HOW TO

HOW TO INSTALL JAVA ON MAC YOUTUBE.COM MAC OS X

HOW TO INSTALL JAVA ON MAC YOUTUBE.COM INSTALL

HOW TO INSTALL JAVA ON MAC YOUTUBE.COM MAC

The Ubuntu repository offers two (2), open-source Java packages, Java Development Kit (Open JDK) and Java Runtime Environment (Open JRE). In this document, we look at different packages within the Java SE. Access to the command-line/terminal window.Installing Java on CentOS 7 or CentOS 8.If you are looking for other Java installation guides, please refer to: HelloWorld.Note: This guide provides instructions that work on Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04 and any other Ubuntu-based distribution (including Linux Mint, Kubuntu, and Elementary OS). We are mapping the local directory with the directory: /usr/src/myapp inside the containerĬreate a docker-compose.yml file: version: "2".Here we are specifying the Java container running version 8 of the SDK ( java:8 - to use Java 7, you could just specify: java:7).Project dependencies are installed within the container - so if you mess up your config you can simply nuke the container and start again.Very easy to switch to different versions of Java by simply changing the tag on the container.No need to set up any version of Java on your local machine (you'll just run Java within a container which you pull from Docker Hub).You can simply run your application within the official JDK container - meaning that you don't have to worry about getting everything set up on your local machine (or worry about running multiple different versions of the JDK for different apps etc)Īlthough this might not help you with your current installation issues, it is a solution which means you can side-step the minefield of issues related with trying to get Java running correctly on your dev machine! To set JAVA_HOME: $ jenv enable-plugin exportĪn option that I am starting to really like for running applications on my local computer is to use Docker. To see all the installed java: $ jenv versionsĪbove command will give the list of installed java: * system (set by /Users/lyncean/.jenv/version)Ĭonfigure the java version which you want to use: $ jenv global oracle64-1.6.0.39 $ jenv add /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.11.0_2.jdk/Contents/Home $ echo 'eval "$(jenv init -)"' > ~/.bash_profileĪdd the installed java to jenv: $ jenv add /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_202.jdk/Contents/Home $ echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.jenv/bin:$PATH"' > ~/.bash_profile

HOW TO INSTALL JAVA ON MAC YOUTUBE.COM INSTALL

Install and configure jenv: $ brew install jenv If you want to install/manage multiple version then you can use 'jenv': To install java 8: $ brew cask install adoptopenjdk/openjdk/adoptopenjdk8 To install latest java: $ brew cask install java Install cask (with Homebrew 0.9.5 or higher, cask is included so skip this step): $ brew tap caskroom/cask

HOW TO INSTALL JAVA ON MAC YOUTUBE.COM MAC

Why doesn't Oracle's installer put it where it really goes? And how can I work around this problem?Īssumption: Mac machine and you already have installed homebrew. Ironically, the "Java" control panel under System Preferences shows only Java 1.8! usr/libexec/java_home -V still only lists the old Java 1.6. I've tried adding a symbolic link to make it look like 1.8 is in the /System/Library.

HOW TO INSTALL JAVA ON MAC YOUTUBE.COM HOW TO

But /usr/libexec/java_home doesn't find 1.8, so all the posts I've found on how to set your current java version don't work. Not sure why the latest installer puts this in /Library instead of /System/Library (nor what the difference is). I ran Oracle's Java 8 installer, and the files look like they ended up at /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_05.jdkīut previous versions are at /System/Library/Java/JavaFrameworks/jdk1.6.

HOW TO INSTALL JAVA ON MAC YOUTUBE.COM MAC OS X

I'm using IntelliJ 13 CE and Mac OS X 9 Mavericks. I want to do some programming with the latest JavaFX, which requires Java 8. Editors note: This question was asked in 2014, and the answers may be outdated.

[darlingpoppet]

Translation of the Erwin and Levi story, "The Crumbled Castle Gate" (CD drama version)

[Cross-posted from twitter]

This audio drama is an adaptation of a short story originally made for AU smartpass and later published as bonus material with the Japanese tankobon. (fan translation of the short story version is here). The audio was included with 5 other short story tracks which came with the Final Season DVD/blu-ray sets as special features. The following is a translation of the audio transcript.

Narration: The entrance to the old castle served also as an opening to the stone wall that surrounded its entirety. Although it had already decayed, what once was a sturdy wooden gate lay fallen on the ground. Above the gate and wall, there was a covered space for people to come and go, and there they could hide to shoot arrows through open holes. It was evidence that humans once fought on a large scale. It was long ago, when knights in armour battled one another. (Footsteps) Levi: What are you looking at, Erwin? Erwin: Oh is that you, Levi? What about Eren? Is he underground? L: I left him with Petra and the others. He might be out and about, but it’s under Hanji’s authorisation. E: That’s fine, then. (Footsteps) L: Is right over there the direction of the royal capital? E: Yes. Can you see it? L: The royal capital? E: An archer has to bend down to shoot their arrow. It must be easy for them to see what’s going on outside. L: What are you trying to say? E: The stones that make up the walls are also thick. The rain can’t blow in, so the view is not obstructed and you can see well. Though it’s a shame that it’s raining, it is a magnificent castle. L: Hanji also said that it’s quite solid. E: If there were to be a war with the monarchy, this would become a strategic location. L: (laughs) That’s no laughing matter, even if you’re joking. The central government is already keeping an eye on us when it comes to Eren. No, not just the government… all of those fucking pigs whose self-preservation is their top priority. Now more than ever you’re in a position where you have to refrain from making such disturbing statements. E: If you’re the only one listening, no one will be able to complain. L: Suit yourself. ([Internal monologue] I can never read Erwin’s thoughts or movements. Even still, the reason I can obey Erwin is for the sake of the final results we’ve been working toward since he became the commander, and because of his infinite determination. If he thinks it is necessary for the liberation of mankind, he’d be willing to turn even the king into an enemy. There’s no use thinking about it. The king and other powers that be have been irrelevant since the beginning. He dedicated his heart for humanity’s freedom.) [Talking aloud] What was so fun earlier about doing nothing but fervently looking outside? E: There wasn’t anything fun about it in particular. I don’t really know why but, I’m just looking around at where I’m standing from up on this high place. L: (laughs) You really are a funny guy. It’s not just that you think outside the box. You were born into a normal household but you joined the Survey Corps, and you go through all this trouble diving into a hell crawling with titans just so you can free humanity. E: It’s not just those who were born poor who are dissatisfied with the status quo. There are just too many things we still don’t understand. What kind of world is outside the walls? Who are the titans? Where did they come from? How should humanity fight in order to exterminate them? L: Who knows. You’re the ones whose job it is to think. I just kill titans, that’s it. E: You’re right. In any case, to me everything inside these walls is like being inside a cage. L: For fuck’s sake, if I thought you were talking like Hanji before, now you’re sounding like the brat! E: Hanji’s knowledge of titans is by far the best in the corps. I could never hope to reach that level of sincerity. L: That damn four-eyes is nothing but a perverted weirdo. E: By ‘brat’, do you mean Eren? According to our documents, even before the fall of Wall Maria he apparently had been saying that being inside the walls is the same as spending a lifetime as livestock. I’m sure I saw it in the records left by the Garrison. L: Yeah, I also get that vibe. Sometimes he looks like an animal… he’s got the eyes of a carnivorous beast on the hunt. E: You’re right. L: He will never be able to submit. He also has hatred for the titans. His mother was eaten up. But moreover, his eyes burn with dissatisfaction for a status quo where having interest outside of the walls is forbidden, on top of frustration with himself for being so ignorant and helpless. E: You’re saying I’m the same way? L: Sometimes. E: (laughs) So you’re saying I have the eyes of a newly minted soldier in my tender years? I must look younger than I thought. L: I’m not praising you. E: I know that. (laughs) L: Tch. Well, going full throttle may be doing it your way but if you’re not careful you’ll get tripped up and you’ll be in a world of pain. E: Yes. It would be wise to proceed with everything cautiously. (rustle of fabric sound) You’ll come along with me, won’t you? (rustle of fabric sound) L: Yes. Because beyond, there has to be a clear breeze to blow away this depressing rain. Narration: The two great men of the Survey Corps stayed there waiting for the rain to stop. The wings of freedom on their backs, soaked from the downpour, looked as if they were shining more than ever.

[gabriel4sam]

Not love at first sight (But love at the sixty-third life defying idiocy), a CodyWan story

Written for @swbigbang, with the help of @kitcatkim in the role of the patient beta and @outernorth for artist (art just there)

Because all the other members of their small outpost were not in shape (read, hungover), Cody and Obi-Wan go on a small, simple, totally not possibilities of explosions supply run.

Cody comes back with a headache the size of Coruscant, a new hate of insectoids life. And a brand new significant other, in the shape of his exasperating General

 It’s not a hangover, it’s a hecatomb. Whatever Boil had put in his new still was a terrible, terrible idea. The entire Separatist Council could do pointes in tutus on the flight deck and the vode would neither see it, nor care about it.

Cody and Obi-Wan were the only ones not drinking the day before, them and the communication officers on duty. The communication officers because they were working, and Cody and Obi-Wan, well, because they like the occasion for the men to feel free, and they can’t with their superior officers in their company.

That doesn’t mean the men are supposed to feel free enough to incapacitate the whole bunch of idiots they are apparently in charge off.

“Latrine duties, the first time we do planet fall. The whole of them.” Cody grumbles, assessing the damage with a cold, clinical eye.

“How does that even work? Does every man have latrine duties for his own latrines? Do you make them install as many latrines as they are? ” Obi-Wan remarks. He’s the usual calm and composed Jedi Master Cody knows on the outside, but the Commander is pretty sure he’s laughing on the inside. Cody had met Quinlan Vos, ok? And he poured enough hard liquor in the man to obtain confidences. Confidences which horrified him, Obi-Wan had even less survival instincts than Cody thought, but confidences he can’t un-hear. He will know forever!

Or at least, he will know until a luckier droid kills him. Cody is not an optimist about clones living long, happy, fulfilling lives. He has eyes after all and a functioning brain.

Cody glares at Obi-Wan, just in case. He has learnt, in the two years since he took his position with his General, that Jedi react pretty well to glaring. Not that it stops them from doing stupid stuff, but at least, they feel guilty about it.

If they like the glaring party only. Commander Ponds had a lot of things to narrate about Mace Windu and the horrible, horrible conglomerate mogul.

Obi-Wan takes his most innocent air, something Cody stopped believing two days in their acquaintance, when his newly minted General had destroyed a whole block of warehouses on an unnamed moon and made a grown Hutt call for its parent. It had been a bad month for Obi-Wan. No need to judge. When innocents are in danger, the cost of the repairs is less a problem and more a number for the politicians to handle. And yes, Obi-Wan knows the money used could certainly be used in other useful ways, but no amount of credits could ever buy a life, in the eyes of a Jedi. But that day, when Cody, after a few, very stressful hours of radio-silence, had finally gotten back his General, slightly charred, the hostages, hungry and thirsty and exhausted but all of them in one piece, and a terrified Hutt, in the middle of a devastated battleground, he had understood better the warning of Alpha-17. There, Cody had sworn in petto to never underestimate his Jedi, despite the irreproachable manners, the swishing hair and the smile of a holo-star.

Together, they take the time to check every soldier, to make sure nobody was busy drowning in their own fluid because they were too hangover/still drunk, to roll over. Everybody is alive, and the communication officers are getting ready to do a double shift, and ready to nib their vode about it later.

“It’s a good thing we’re on down time,” Obi-Wan remarks, “I must confess, despite the talents of your brothers, I’m not quite sure we could withstand an attack from Grievous and his various cronies right now.”

“We would get our asses handed to us, you mean.”

“Exactly.”

Obi-Wan cautiously touches  one of the abandoned drink containers, with more care than he gives to explosives.

“What did he put in this thing?” he asks, fascinated.

“You’re not testing it!” Cody immediately retorts, because he knows his Jedi, “not in the name of science, curiosity or whatever.”

Obi-Wan touches the container a second time.

Cody could swear the thing moves in return, like it wants to be pet. Obi-Wan hums, his face interested and he leans a little more in the direction of the container. If the thing starts growing whatever strange means of locomotion is on its mind, Cody is using his blaster, no matter the General’s opinion. That’s how bad holo-dramas start, with an unknown thing unleashed on an unsuspecting ship/outpost/space station. He refuses to star in one of those plot-lacking dramas his brother Wolffe pretends he doesn’t love.

The thing doesn’t move anymore and Obi-Wan loses interest and goes back to helping troopers into their quarters and their bunks.

Cody helps, but that doesn’t mean he’s not plotting terrible retributions. He knows the last few weeks have been pretty hard, the hardest in a long time, that’s one of the reasons Obi-Wan and himself made themselves scarce last night. 

Now, they have a week just waiting for the Negotiator to come pick them up. One week for the men to rest and to heal and perhaps to train lightly…but that’s no reason for the sort of screw-up Cody is seeing right now. Boil and his still should be transferred from the 501th and put into whatever part of the army that handles studies about biological warfare. Biological warfare that the Republic officially doesn’t indulge in, studying it only as a way to protect its worlds against it. But Cody isn’t convinced. He has a lot of questions he will never ask about parts of the army which are not led by Jedi, and that the Jedi are trying, with no success, to have access too. Obi-Wan has promoted him so much that the Commander now has access to documents he’s pretty sure nobody thought a clone ever would. He’s staying silent for now. If the Jedi need help with that, if they fail, the vode will try, but Cody is keeping this ammunition in reserve. He can only fire it once, because when natural-borns who aren’t Jedi realize exactly how much power Obi-Wan and the Jedi council has given him and some of the other commanders, they will try to strip them of it, he just knows it.

At the end, everybody is moaning in their bunks, or manning communication, and Cody and Obi-Wan raid the nice rations, the ones with the green seals, no less food of unkown origins than the rest of it, but certainly the tastiest. They sit down at the entry of the outpost, sharing a canteen of water between them. They don’t talk, most of the time they don’t need to.

Cody isn’t really hungry but it’s easier to trick Obi-Wan into eating something when those who surround him do too. The warmth of the sun, the sounds of nature, the nice, and so rare, oh so rare, knowledge that they have a little free time instead of having to run to put out another fire. All of this is making Obi-Wan soften, like a carving of stone suddenly becoming pliable.

“Commander?” Cody’s holocom disturbs them, and Cody startles, suddenly realizing he was lost in the light playing into the copper of Obi-Wan’s hair.

“It’s nothing, really nothing probably,” the shiny in charge of this particular console explains to them, “ one of the new models of probes  should have been back twenty minutes ago. I tried to raise it per the procedure, but it isn’t answering.”

“We’re supposed to be alone on this world,” Obi-Wan remarks, a line forming between his brows.

“They are still working the kicks out of this model,” the shiny admits, “that’s why we used them specifically on this planet where they are in no danger. We’re supposed to go back with all of them, for study, to hammer out the last problems.”

The line between the General’s brows is growing deeper.

“I will make a report to the Council about the danger it could pose to you, to send any vode on the field with materials not totally ready, and the Jedi Order will issue a formal protest.” His shoulders are tense. No matter the number of tries, the Jedi are blocked at every corner in the Senate in their efforts to better the life of the clones, even in the small things and it’s a terrible possibility that this time will be the same.

“You know what? We should go check ourselves,” Cody decides, because he wants to erase that line, that tension. “Since Boil poisoned the men, we could do it. A little trek in fresh air before breathing the recycled air in the Negotiator again.”

“Oh Cody, I can do it myself,” Obi-Wan offers immediately, “you don’t have a lot of free time-“

“Funny, I would have sworn you didn’t know the concept…”

“I am perfectly capable of knowing when my body needs down time.”

“That’s not what Master Erin said.”

And that’s how they leave the base.

It’s almost noon, birds or other small things Cody can’t honestly identify are chirping, the air is crisp and fresh, and the sky is only slightly purple, with no risk of rain. No matter how many worlds he sees, Cody is still out of countenance on worlds where the combination of gases in the atmospheres and stars emitting other waves than the Kamino sun combine to give entire landscapes strange colours. Most of the time, he’s wearing his helmet which filters the strangeness of it, and it’s only at the end of the battle, when he takes it off, that he realizes everything is weirdly green-tainted.

Also, he’s pretty sure Arc Trooper Fives was lying when he told him once he visited a world on a body guarding mission with his own Jedi were everything was glittering. He’s not putting any money on it, because Skywalker and his men were guarding the Naboo Senator. From what Cody observes, when Naboo people enter the scene, glitter just happens. He also thinks Fives is much better being Rex’s problem than his own.

Most of their supplies have already been packed for retrieval, so Cody and Obi-Wan only took one hover bike out, and for now Obi-Wan is piloting, Cody behind, and the Commander is beginning to think he made a tactical error. The plastoid of his armour is supposed to stop him from feeling Obi-Wan’s warmth, but Cody could swear he can still feel it. For all that the Jedi can seem aloof and strange, nothing makes him remember his General is flesh and blood than encircling a linen-warped waist with his arms.

 The world passes around them, the colours of the trees, the playful course of the clouds in the sky, the peaceful scenery of a wild world, with its inherent qualities and defaults. Cody likes those worlds better, untouched by sentient life. Growing up in the sterility of Kamino, there is something intoxicating in nature running its course, forests giving way to meadows, biotopes decided by climates and geology, and not by a careful hand arranging them for the maximal profits in their exploitation.

Cody understands about the need for fresh territory, with the growth of population, but certainly, certainly the most carefully hidden part of him insists quite vehemently, there must be another solution than the desolation of grey and pollution that is Coruscant. Something else than seeing the poorest people of the Republic living in deplorable conditions, never seeing the fresh green of a new leaf, as the richest ones can sample the delights of nature in carefully constructed reserves?

More and more, Cody is curious about the Agricorps, and their works to restore degraded biotopes, but he had the vague impression, when he asked questions about it to his General, that it’s a difficult subject for him.

Probably, Obi-Wan wanted to go into the Agricorps and they didn’t want him to, for whatever reasons. Cody thinks it’s more glorious to restore nature and to help feed a community than to go to war, like Obi-Wan is doing right now, or to negotiate treaties, which he vaguely thinks is Obi-Wan’s job in time of peace.

Cody’s thoughts drift gently as the journey continues, going from nature’s beauty to the exact shade of Obi-Wan’s hair when he has been under a natural sun for more than a few hours. The way the copper of it becomes richer and richer…. After a little less than two hours, they switch pilots, and Cody does his best to keep his thoughts on track. It would be stupid to crash just because he’s distracted by a flight of birds taking off with the noise of the bikes, no matter how graceful they are. He concentrates on piloting, and not on the presence of Obi-Wan behind him, his arms around Cody, and not in the colours of the forest around them, and the bucolic impression of their little expedition.

The last known position of their wayward probe put it next to a small lake, four hours away on hover bike, at the base of the mountainous regions. If this part of the world was in winter season, the most logical reason for their missing probe would be a mudslide.  Cody told in his reports time and time again that the probes should fly higher, that the field itself is much less friendlier than believed in the labs, but apparently nobody listens to him.

It’s the end of spring on this part of the planet, the probe was probably eaten by a giant fish, or something equally undignified.

They unseat on a single beach, the last known location. No more probe there than dignity and decency in the Senate. Nothing. No blackened hull of the thing if it had exploded under mysterious circumstances, best known as shoddy work in the conception. Not even a trace they could track back.

Cody turns on himself, surveying the landscape. Vegetation, mountains, peaceful lapping of water on the beach, more mountains with their snowy capes, a lot of weird looking trees. For a vacation, it would be peaceful. For missing military equipment, it’s sadly lacking.

“By incredible luck, you wouldn’t sense our missing flying friend in the Force?” Cody asks, because that would simplify things. That would simplify things, so of course the answer is no. As Obi-Wan struggles with putting together the scanner, Cody gathers pieces of driftwood, intending to start a fire. If they have to circle on foot, on uneven ground, to find the probes, nothing says they can’t do it after another meal next to a warm fire. In the harsh reality of war, Cody has learnt to wisely enjoy the few moments of peace, and he would very much like to teach that skill to his General. Obi-Wan is supposed to have decades of experience in him, but apparently he’s not aware that every sentient has their limits.

Cody is less than twenty meters from the Jedi and the hoverbike, facing Obi-Wan, his arms already full of a nice load when he sees Obi-Wan let go of the scanner, which tumbles on the stones, and turns to him, a hand already at his waist, reaching for his lightsaber.

“Cod-“ Obi-Wan yells, but the sound doesn’t reach Cody, as the stones give way under him, shifting in a dip of grey sand and Cody is gulped down like Master Yoda gobbles a small fish.

For a second, he can’t breathe, there is sand everywhere around him, on his skin, in his mouth, infiltrating his armour by the neck, and the wood in his arms squeeze against his ribs. He feels he’s gonna get crushed alive and he struggles with all his strength. Death has always been the end but he wanted to leave in combat. He can feel unconsciousness threatening and just before it would take him, he’s spit up violently and he rolls over with the momentum, the driftwood, the sand, and a few bits of the armour which didn’t survive the experience.

He can see someone lean over him, no more than a silhouette, because it’s so dark, he can feel the sand under his head, and also the head wound and the blood seeping out of it, and he takes a long breath, and it burns, all the way to his lungs, and then he knows no more.

For a long time, Cody floats. He dreams. Or he hallucinates.

He’s on Kamino again and he learns the world is without mercy for him and his brothers.

He’s training and he can feel Alpha-17’s eyes on him, pensive.

He’s very young and he doesn’t understand where the last of his batche went.

He’s older and he’s meeting his first Jedi, General Tii, and she always has a nice word for every clone, but her eyes are terribly sad every step she takes on Kamino.

He’s meeting Rex and their friendship soars instantly.

He’s seeing brothers dying and he’s seeing rescues and the world is a never ending war, but Cody refuses to let that be the only thing his brothers will know. He watches and he checks and he learns and he places his brothers the best he can, and he’s evaluating Jedi and people, and planets and his mind never stops.

Cody wakes up. General Plo Koon is leaning over him and Cody lets relief seize him, until he realizes something is wrong. No eye covers, no breathing masks, and as much as Cody can see in the very low light, the thick leathery hide acting as skin is much lighter than Plo Koon’s. A Kel Dor, but not the Jedi Master that the Wolffe’s pack would follow to the end of the galaxy and beyond.

After a few seconds of his brain going round in circles, it finally stops at a very important point: Kel Dor and humans don’t breathe the same atmosphere, and this Kel Dor is without breathing apparels. Cody goes to put a hand on his mouth in instinctual movement, like he could stop himself from suffocating, but the other lays a hand on Cody’s forearm, his entire body language non-threatening, and says something he can’t understand. That’s when Cody realizes something translucent is surrounding his head, like a bubble inflating and deflating with every breath he takes. He pokes it, very carefully. It’s flexible, slightly sticky and it smells earthy, a little like those mushrooms his General insisted he try once, when he took him to his friend Dex dinner.

Cody takes a careful breath. He doesn’t die in terrible suffering, so he takes another one. The air entering his lungs still seems appropriate for his species. He tries to sit up, moving very slowly to make the stranger understand he’s not attacking, and the Kel Dor helps him.

Seated, he can better observe the place around him. He has been placed on a pallet of light fur, in some sort of carved place, the walls decorated, not in paint, but in carving, and his armour is against one of the walls, carefully stacked. Cody wants to touch his head, where he was hurt, but once again the Kel Dor stops him before he touches the bubble. The only light comes from a small clay bowl full of sizzling oil, where a wick has been adapted. It doesn’t give enough light to help Cody see more than the small room and a crude overture in the stone, leading to more darkness. He can’t even study perfectly the features of the Kel Dor, more than to be sure it’s definitely not Master Koon.

The Kel Dor says something again and Cody makes a frustrated noise.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak your language.” The other doesn’t seem to understand that, so Cody tries Mando’a, with the same result. 

He tries the Galactic Sign Language, no results. 

He knows a few signs of the Alderaan Sign Language, the one from their Southern Hemisphere. Queen Organa taught him a few lessons once during a lockdown in the Royal Palace when he was guarding her, between grumbling about clones’s rights and what her husband better do about it in the Senate, and Cody learns fast. The Kel Dor still doesn’t react in any useful way.

“A common language would be pretty useful to know if I’m your guest or your prisoner,” Cody jokes. Sarcasm now. He’s spending too much time with his General.

He shifts, trying to see if he will be stopped from standing, but the other only helps him, carefully arranging on Cody’s torso the ending of the bubble. Now that Cody studies it more attentively, he’s sure the stuff is organic. It’s like they forced his head and the superior part of his torso into some sort of ring of weird looking mushrooms, the mycelium of one of them extended around his head. If this is producing oxygen for him, he really doesn’t want to disturb it.

The world tilts when he stands up but the Kel Dor pushes a shoulder under Cody’s arm and they go out. When Cody passes his armour, he fetches his blaster, and the other doesn’t stop him. Either he doesn’t understand it’s a weapon, or he doesn’t think Cody will attack him. Her? Them? Are Kel Dol gendered beings?

Exiting the small room, Cody can’t see. Everything is dark around them. He can hear movements and the air around him has the quality of an enormous space. A cave, he would think, but the little lamp his new friend has in his claws is not enough.

“Of course,” Cody remarks, “your eyes are much much better. You don’t need a bank of lamps.” He almost jumps when someone joins them and if his head wasn’t still ringing, he probably would have attacked, but it’s only another Kel Dor, smaller, with a skin more brown. They ask something to the first one, but again, there is no sense for Cody.

He’s guided to a stone bench and the little lamp is pushed into his hands. Kel Dor are going in and out of the little circle and Cody tries to evaluate how many of them there are, but he’s, to his great shame, not good enough to distinguish between the Kel Dor easily. He can isolate one or two who have more evident features for a human, like one missing an arm, but the rest of them, all dressed in a very similar way with some furs identical to those Cody woke up on, and the alien features. Cody feels anger against himself. He judges natural borns for not making an effort to distinguish between the vode, despite their efforts to gain their own identity by tattoos or dyes, and he shouldn’t be victim of the same bias.

Finally, someone sits next to him. Cody studies their face, trying to commit them to memory.

 People don’t seem unfriendly. He’s pretty sure the one he woke up with is some sort of local healer, and that it is this one who came back to him several times. Children even come to him, chattering in their language in a way which makes him think of the younger ones on Kamino, before some of their batches started to disappear and they started to understand what their fate in the world would be. A particularly daring little one climbs onto his lap and Cody looks around, ready to see the parent arrive and take its offspring from the strange being. But this community seems so peaceful nobody sees a problem with the child on the stranger's lap.

The little one shows him his treasure, a cube deeply carved with symbols Cody can’t decipher. Of course. In a world without sun, carving must be a medium and painting, or writing, must be inexistent.

“It’s a very nice cube,” he says to the little one, whose gender he can’t decipher. If Kel Dor have gender. He’s pretty sure he heard once that the biggest number of genders registered for a sentient species was eight, and the smaller zero, but he has no idea for this species.

The child seems pretty happy with the answer, even if they can’t understand it any more than Cody can understand their own opinion, expressed in an uninterrupted flow.

Around him, he can vaguely perceive people going about their day. How calm. How reposing. Nevertheless, peaceful or not, Cody can’t breathe the same atmosphere as them, and the strange organic concoction they put on his head to help will soon find its limits. He’s getting thirsty, for once, and he can’t drink without taking the thing off, which he can't. And that’s not even thinking about his General, who must be trying to reach him by any means the Force gives him.

If he knows Cody is alive.

No, no, he must know.

And even if the Force, whose exact limitations Cody is quite unsure of, even if the Force can’t tell Obi-Wan Cody is alive, Obi-Wan is not exactly a man to just go back to the outpost and declare him dead. He will search and search and search, and bring Cody back alive to his vode, or his body for his brothers to honour.

Cody knows: it had been a terrible row between the Jedi on one part and the Kaminoan and the Senate on another, this refusal to abandon dead clones bodies to the elements.

And, to the surprise of the Senate who was in the habits to bully the Jedi for centuries, the Jedi hadn’t budged. But Cody had seen what it had cost them: the Senate had made them pay, in late important reports who the Jedi needed for the war efforts, on refusal of important supplies, suddenly labelled unessential…

So, Obi-Wan is searching for him at the moment, and Cody needs to go to him. The ringing in his head, present since he woke up, has slightly diminished, and he has walked with more grievous wounds.

The question is now: how to mime exit to the Kel Dor, how to ask for a guide? Because if he has to feel around the cave until he finds an exit, he will, but that would be so much easier.

“Hoping there is an exit into your cave, little one,” he says to the child, who is falling asleep on his lap, “because if I have to drill through the roof to the exterior of the planet, it’s gonna cause breathing problems for your city.”

An adult approaches them, a long plaid in their hands, and they mime Cody putting it around his shoulders. Instead, Cody wraps the little one in it and puts the resulting bundle into the adult’s arms.

“I don’t suppose you could send me to the nearest exit?” He asks, and of course, the Kel Dor doesn’t have an answer.

He takes the little lamp and leaves to explore. He can’t see well more than two meters from the circle of light, and even with it, his eyes are struggling.

Soon, he’s stopped by a wall, which he follows until he finds a low door, with only a curtain. He risks an eye, feeling quite voyeuristic, but he only sees something resembling a storage space, big amphoras against a wall.

He continues to follow the wall, finds another one, loses himself in what is a succession of low houses. Above him, the roof of the cavern is still invisible and he can’t see the walls. He finds another little place with stone benches.

Or is it the same?

No, even underground, Cody is sure of his sense of direction. It’s another one place, and the city is bigger than he thought possible. He’s also walking way too slowly, because of the problem of light and his still ringing head.

“Kriff,” he whispers, sitting down on one of the benches.

“Obi-Wan, please find me,” he whispers before scolding himself. He’s no melodrama maiden, he is perfectly capable of finding the surface again by himself.

A burly Kel Dor approaches him, mushrooms in his claws and says something.

“I’m sorry, I can’t understand what you’re saying,” Cody tries to explain. The other sits next to him and gesticulates to the mushrooms helping, he thinks, him to breath, and when Cody doesn’t do anything, he starts placing the ones he brought against the first ones. They seem to merge in a frankly disgusting scene which is probably mushrooms porn.

“Does that mean you need to change them regularly for me to breathe?” Cody asks, despite knowing he won’t receive an answer he can understand.

 To add another problem to the long list Cody is already shouldering on, the cave floor starts to tremble and people start yelling.

People are yelling, and despite the language barrier, Cody can understand the panic with no problems.

The soil beneath his feet grumbles again. There is a sound like a rockslide, and more yells, and terror is the taste at the back of Cody’s throat, because he still can’t kriffin see.

Finally, the trembling is so terrible he’s thrown on his knees and the sound reaches a crescendo as a great light emerges from the rock soil, three hundred meters from where Cody is kneeling. It’s some sort of giant worm, with a maw higher than Cody. It roars and glows even brighter, the bioluminescence of its chitin almost dazzling for Cody himself.

 All around Cody, Kel Dor are yelling and struggling on their feet with great difficulties, as the rock soil is still trembling. The beast roars again and it sounds like a thousand ships taking off at the same time in the confined environment. As Cody is helping a Kel Dor to their feet, the pandemonium reaches an even higher spike as another worm emerges, further than the first, and the quake of the rock sends them flat on their bellies.

Cody really regrets letting Boil distribute his production yesterday, what he wouldn’t give for ten men and a rotary canon right now! Even for Hardcase, who he’s really happy is most of the time Rex’s problem, and his tastes for explosives.

He hoists himself more or less vertical, swearing all he can at the same time. He helps the Kel Dor to their feet again and then assesses the situation.

The lights of the worms let him have a good gaze for the first time at the enormous cavern they are in and the low buildings in it. Behind them he can even see big overtures, probably an entire network of caverns. An entire city in the dark, deep in the soil, protected from the outside world and its atmosphere which the Kel Dor can’t breathe, and from the Republic scanners which never knew they were there.

Protected from the sun, too.

And now that the light has come to them in the form of predators, they are defenceless. Cody can see people trying to flee, with a hand on their eyes, and with no success. By the time Cody has succeeded in approaching the scene of the disaster, at least three Kel Dor have been swallowed.

One of the worms, the closest, roars again and Cody doesn’t lose time: the maw, unprotected by the chitin covering the body, seems like a perfect target.

He raises his blaster and fires.

Another roar, even more deafening, as blood splatters all around in a gorish scene. A good part of the mandible has exploded, but the beast isn’t dead. It strikes, trying to gobble Cody like it did the poor Kel Dor. The difference is that the Commander can see in the light, on the contrary of the first victims. He evades just in time to escape certain death.

He rolls over and raises his blaster a second time, but the angle is worse than the first time, and the shot dampens itself on the chitin with no more effect than darkening it, and enraging the worm even more. 

Again, it tries to kill Cody and the man dances out of range, blessing the hours of training the Jedi gave all of them. It had been the first thing the Jedi had done, because they thought the training the vode had received on Kamino didn’t focus enough on the art of dodging.

Cody never told them it was because the trainers and the Kaminoans thought the vode easily expandable and more useful for a suicide strike. He suspects the Jedi knew, if the way they act around the Kaminoans is proof.

Dodging, advancing, retreating, taking a shot every time he sees an overture, Cody fights, more a reflex than anything, to protect the Kel Dor. He wouldn’t refuse a little help; with spears even if they don’t have other weapons, but the cavern inhabitants are useless. They are not even running away from the worms, full of the terror of death, and the light, which have come in their city.

Nevertheless, the issue of the fight was never a real question. Even hurt and far away from his usual fighting grounds, Cody was bred a warrior and he had honed the skills given to him by his genetic donor all his life. The worm, a female, is in the habit of only fighting other female worms during the mating season for access to the best breeding ponds and to gobble Kel Dor and every animal it could. It never had to fight a sentient being, especially one with a blaster.

The blaster’ shots finally damage the roof of its mouth enough and one of them burns its path to the brain. The beast dies immediately, but the nervous system needs time to receive that message. For a moment, Cody fears the convulsions of the enormous body will cause the entire caves system to collapse on their heads.

When the movements finally stop, he vaults himself over a rock slide, caused by the events, and approaches carefully. The worm is still partially obscured by the rock he emerges from, but Cody can see a good twenty meters of it. He’s bringing back a chitin part to the GAR, because he wants ships protected like that!

A sudden movement to his left makes him turn, but too late. His zoological fascination has caused Cody to make a horrible, rookie mistake, the sort of mistake which makes a rookie never have an occasion to become something other than a rookie.

For a moment, he had forgotten there was a second worm.

He brandishes his weapon, but it’s too late. Only his reflexes save him from being cut in two, but a razor sharp incisor scraps against his armour, parting it like butter and only missing the skin by half a centimetre. The worm has no interest in the Kel Dor, no matter how easy prey they are. It just wants to kill the stubborn little creature who just killed its mother. His blaster clatters on the rock, too kriffin far away. Cody rolls on himself, tries for it, but he already knows it’s too late, when the sound of a lightsaber being ignited announces the arrival of the cavalry, just in time.

Obi-Wan Kenobi arrives on the scene like an armed deux ex machina. He’s wearing Cody’s helmet in order to breath in the cavern and death is burning light-blue in his hand. Rare are the materials which can resist the power of a lightsaber, and Obi-Wan doesn’t take chances with Cody’s life, no matter how he is repelled by the taking of a life, even an animal one. The head of the worm falls on the other side of the body as Obi-Wan is still airborne from one of those improbable jumps Force Sensitive do. The second his feet touch the rock; he’s rushing to Cody, trying to assess his health.

Across the galaxy, Anakin suddenly sits down in the marital bed, sending Padmé, who was asleep across his torso, tumbling into the sheets by the violence of his movements. The vision of a chitinous torso opening, full of meaty juice, dances before his eyes.

“Ani?” The young Senator asks, once he has succeeded in making her put down the blaster she retrieved from even the Force doesn’t know where. Padmé doesn’t do peaceful when she’s woken up abruptly, something he learned quickly in their marriage. Convincing the handmaiden that every noise inside their bedroom wasn’t a murder attempt and that they shouldn’t rush in, weapons drawn, was another interesting adjustment to the married life.

“I just.….I’m not sure…” He tries to grip what woke him up, but it already has disappeared. “I think I’m hungry,” he admits, “sorry to have interrupted your sleep.”

“The droids can make you something,” she suggests, burrowing into the nest of pillows, less prone to sudden shifting.

“Do you think we have insects?” He asks.

****************************

“Cody! Cody, are you alright?”

“Obi-Wan, General, are you hurt?” Cody and Obi-Wan ask at the same time, hands searching, patting the other bodies in gestures less destined to triage of wounds and more to the simple animal need for contact.

“The air of the cavern isn’t breathable for us,” Obi-Wan says, after a few seconds and Cody nods: “I deduced that, but the thing on my head….it’s helping.”

“How did you deduce such a- Oh, um, hello.”

Around them, the Kel Dor have begun to assemble, all of them an arm on their face, trying to protect their eyes.

“Your lightsaber, turn it off,” Cody says and, making something purr in the Commander’s chest, Obi-Wan immediately obeys, no question, no hesitation.

The Kel Dors guide them away from the scene of the carnage. Cody sees a few of them with stone machetes and axes, already working on taking apart the pale flesh of the worms, working from the wounds Cody and Obi-Wan made, as the chitin is too hard on other places of the big bodies.

Cody watches for a few seconds. One of a Kel Dor yanks open the cranial cavity. Cody turns to the other side very quickly, because butchering enormous worms is apparently more than his battle-hardened stomach can take. Nothing should make the noise an axe makes against flesh.

Cody finds his little lamp again. It’s not even extinguished, the events haven’t probably lasted more than ten minutes. The universe is a hard place, thinks Cody, where he could get eaten by any abomination with too much teeth in less time than an oil lamp runs its course.

They sit next to each other on the closest bench and in the halo of the lamp, Cody inspects his General better. He’s covered in stone dust and whatever else disgusting stuff is on his tunic: he probably crawled his way there.

The adrenaline is still burning through Cody, and joy too, as he turns to his General. On the whole, he misses the days life was simpler on Kamino, with no worms for example, but on Kamino, he never heard the sound of a lightsaber and knew, with a certainty so burning it could have well resonated in the Force, that he was saved. There is comfort, in the hard world he’s living in, in the certainty that his General will tear apart entire solar systems to rescue any clones. That all Jedi would. For a clone, raised to be interchangeable, this strong-willed refusal to leave even one of them behind is a balm to the soul.

“You found me,” he says, and he tries to infuse that with professionalism, and fails miserably.

“I will always find you,” Obi-Wan promises. It’s strange to talk to him like that, with Cody’s helmet on his head. Cody hadn’t realized he relied so much on the Jedi’s face to understand him.

“Yes, sir, but for a moment, I confess I thought you would more, avenge me or something.”

Obi-Wan touches his shoulder.

“I’m sorry to have been so long,” he says, “the system of caves proved itself tricky, and the Force insisted I couldn’t just blow up my way inside.”

“That would let the atmosphere on the outside enter,” Cody theorized, “and I think, our hosts….”

Like they have been summoned, two Kel Dor approach them. They are dressed as simply as all the others Cody has seen, but on the bust of the smaller one, there is some sort of ceremonial pectoral and it has a very big difference with everything Cody has seen since stepping into the cave. It’s in metal.

“Obi-Wan”, Cody whispers, “look at that.”

Obi-Wan doesn’t speak the language more than Cody. He can recognize it’s not the actual principal language of Kel Dor, which he has heard before, but no more than that. Nevertheless, it’s less a problem for a Jedi. He can feel in the Force other’s intentions, enough to understand easily that the people here don’t want to harm them, which Cody had deduced himself hours ago, and that they want to bring them to see something.

Cody is very happy to leave the dead bodies of the worms behind them.

And to  General Skywalker eats insects! Bless the Force that Skywalker is Rex’s Jedi.

One cave. Another. Another one.

“How many are there? How big are these caves?'' Cody asks. He’s tired, hungry, thirsty, and more or less ready to go back to camp, thank you very much.

They find a ship, or more, the skeleton of a ship, in the last part of the caves system, the deepest one. It’s less a cave, and more the memory of a crash. The ship has been cannibalized, years after years, of everything useful, to the latest scrap of metal, except for the framework.

“It was probably made with a metal too dense for the meagre set of tools they have,” Obi-Wan theorizes.

“I can’t recognize the type of  ship that is, the form itself is so strange,” Cody remarks, watching it with the eye of a man trained to recognize enemy and ally ships in a nano second in the middle of battle. Obi-Wan is touching the metal with his bare skin, with great reverence.

He always loved old things, his Jedi.

The happiest Cody had seen him was for a protection mission in a dusty archive, on a faraway world. General Skywalker was with them, and the young Ahsoka too, and the intel had been faulty. There had been no attack, Obi-Wan had had his Padawan and GrandPadawan close and safe, and spent his days making amorous noises at poetry treaties centuries old.

“It’s incredibly old. Probably before the foundation of the Republic."

"But that’s….that’s old as kriff."

"During the first time of space travel, ships weren’t as reliable. They probably are the descendants of a crew of explorers. After the crash, staying inside the caves was the only long-term possibility for them, if they hadn’t the means to produce enough respiratory apparatuses. It was the only way to survive for them.  Nevertheless, it stopped anyone from finding them. And little by little, they regressed technically and lost the way to contact the outside."

"Do you really think they would have travelled from their world without a way to breath on other planets?"

"Perhaps it was stocked in a part of the ship lost during the crash. Perhaps it was so long ago, it was long before the Kel Dor knew very few worlds have an atmosphere breathable for them…Every species has the tendency to think the world at large tailored for them.”

They don’t leave immediately. Obi-Wan is of the opinion that Cody is too tired to use the path he himself used to find him. And he’s probably right. Cody’s head is throbbing where he hurt it during his fall, but he doesn’t see how he could get better here, where he can’t eat or drink.

What follows is a game of mime between Obi-Wan and the Kel Dors which Cody won’t forget, ever, no matter how much Obi-Wan asks, and he regrets he doesn’t have a holocamera.

After a time, and an unforgettable time it was, Obi-Wan and he find themselves stashed in a little room, so low they can’t stand. It’s more a bed stuffed inside some sort of structure made in the same weird-looking, weird-smelling mushrooms. Cody takes off the bubble around his head and Obi-Wan takes off Cody’s helmet.

The red head has the worst case of helmet’s hair Cody has seen, ever and Cody can’t stop an unprofessional laugh around his first mouthful of fresh water.

“I don't Not a head made for helmets, do I?” the Jedi smiles, as he tore in two a strange looking loaf of bread.

They fall on the food, famished, and tease each other at the same time. There is water and what Cody thinks is some root vegetables, and flatbread, and some meat he isn’t touching with a ten foot pool, just in case it's giant worm.  

“If you swear to wear armour instead of linen in battle, I swear to the Force I will never mock your hair,” Cody smiles in return, and Obi-Wan makes a face, like he did already wear good, solid protection instead of tunic and leggings and whatever he calls the multiple layers of his Jedi’s clothes.

“I thought….for a moment, I thought…” Obi-Wan stops. It’s rare to see him lost for words, he of the Silver tongue, the Negotiator.

“I’m not dead,” Cody reiterates, because there is no need to beat around the bush. Even risking their lives every day the Force makes, nobody likes the kick of adrenaline when one of your men is missing. It never becomes normal. It never should.

“And yet, for a second I thought you were. When I saw the earth opening under your feet and gobbling you. And when I arrived during your battle, the Force trumpeting in my heart about the mortal danger you were running to.”

“The Kel Dor were pretty useless against those things. Couldn’t let them get eaten like that. Not when they rescued me and helped me.”

“I know. I know. And I would have done exactly the same thing.”

Obi-Wan sits on the bed, less gracefully than he usually does. From where he’s leaning against the mushroom wall, Cody stares. He can see the lines around his mouth, and after his late-night conversation with Master Quinlan Vos, he knows they aren’t from laughing. He can see the lines at the edges of the eyes, discreet for now, a little more present every day. He can see the first traces of grey on the temples, simply a trace of silver in the red mane…. He’s, almost, sure there was no grey at the beginning of the war, he has seen the holos of Obi-Wan against Prime, against Jango, all those years ago, on Kamino.

Obi-Wan is burning too bright, burning himself.

And Obi-Wan isn’t the only one not getting younger. The accelerated aging isn’t exactly good for Cody’s health, starting with his knees.

One day, he won’t be quick enough for the next giant, bioluminescent man-gobbling worm. Or Obi-Wan will be too tired against Grievous. Since they met, an assignment Commander- General decided by Alpha-17 himself, their life has been full of Separatist assassins, murderous fauna, Sith assassins, murderous geology, Separatist assassins pretending to be Sith assassins, and Sith assassins pretending to be Separatists assassins, brain-washed murderous Senators, murderous flora, murderous black holes, and one time a murderous sentient ship.

The whole galaxy is conspiring to kill clones and Jedi, for what Cody can see.

If his math is right, he survived today the sixty-third attempt on his life from Fate since he left Kamino. Obi-Wan was there for most of them, and Cody was around for the latest attempts on Obi-Wan’s life.

And one day, it will stop.

Cody opens his mouth before he can talk himself out of it. Life is short and he’s a soldier slave, he doesn’t have the luxury to wait for another time.

“I think I’m falling in love with you,” he says, and Obi-Wan looks like he has been whacked on the skull with a heavy object. It’s not exactly his best face, mouth round in surprise, and Cody only feels affection. Then Obi-Wan’s lips curve into a smile like a sun, blinding, warm, and the Jedi touches the side of Cody’s face.

The Jedi touches the side of Cody’s face.

He doesn’t speak. Not yet. His head against Cody, his breath sharing Cody’s own air, they close their eyes, and Cody experiences the strange idea that he’s detaching himself from his brothers.

For the first time, there is something in his hands, or well, in his heart, that he doesn’t want to share with Wolffe or Boil, or even Rex, who has become his closest brother.

He doesn’t want to hide Obi-Wan from them, but he wants….

He hasn’t the words. Not yet.

But, with Obi-Wan at his side, he hopes he will learn them.

And he hopes his brothers too can find something, or someone, so precious they need to share the joy of knowing it, but also to keep it to themselves, like he wants to keep to himself the smile of Obi-Wan when Cody tells “I love you”, or the small freckles at the side of his mouth, visible only so, so, so close.

The first “I love you” Cody hears from Obi-Wan is whispered against his lips.

The first kiss tastes of the bread offered by the Kel Dor, of the cave’s dust and it’s perfect.

They’re still in the same situation, two exhausted men, in a cave full of toxic gases, only protected from them by some unknown mushrooms exuding oxygen, and Cody feels like he could take over the entire Republic. He sleeps curved around Obi-Wan, like two parts of the same whole, touching as much as they can, and if the headache from his head wound brings Cody to the surface a few times during their nap, he feels rejuvenated after it.

After, the Kel Dor help them find the surface and Cody and Obi-Wan leave their new friends, hand in hand, quite happy to find back the sun and the sky, the fresh air of a late morning…and almost all their men crawling around their area, trying desperately to find them.

Obi-Wan keeps Cody’s hand in his and a few brothers less intimidated than others by Cody’s glare, embarrassed and proud at the same time, even bumped their big brother’s shoulders as a sign of congratulation. Obi-Wan immediately goes red, like he’s a teen on his first crush, and not a seasoned Jedi Master whose touch can bring life or death. 

Cody finds it adorable. 

*******************

It’s the middle of the night shift on the Negotiator, but Cody is still working on a different time zone, so he lets Obi-Wan sleep peacefully in their shared bunk. Their shared bunk! A notion that still makes him giddy like a shiny at their first kiss, even a month after getting together. They are taking things pretty slow, or in the wrong order, Cody isn’t sure, they sleep in the same bunk every night, but haven’t got very far in term of sex, and this perfect, because this is them, and not some sort of artificial list of relationship’s milestone. And Cody already knows, deep in his soul, that he will never love a man like he loves this one, even if Obi-Wan is killed tomorrow, and he’s sure it’s the same for Obi-Wan. 

The Negotiator is in route to join with the Steadfast, so General Koth is on board after a conjoined mission where Obi-Wan and him gave Cody new grey hairs. He finds him easily in the mess, demolishing a healthy serving. The stamps outside the rations are a different colour than the ones Cody and his brothers eat.

“Can I join you?” Cody asks.

“Of course,” Eeth Koth immediately answers and the chair on the other side of the table moves on its own, offering itself for the Commander. Cody arches a brow.

“Don’t tell Obi-Wan,” the General jokes, “or I will endure a lesson for frivolous use of the Force.”

Cody sits and they stay silent for a moment, the General apparently happy to let him come to his questions in peace, continuing to eat his meal. Despite being tailored for a different species’ nutritional needs, it looks exactly as unappetizing as most rations Cody is used too. 

“General Ke-“

“You can call him Obi-Wan in front of me,” Eeth Koth interrupts. “There is no need to be ashamed of what binds you.” He grimaces. “Force knows we will all need all the comfort we can get before everything is set and done in this war.”

“Obi-Wan and I, we had a bit of an adventure, last month.”

“From what I heard, you have a lot of them.”

“Yes but….it was…it was the first time I was around civilians. Normal people, I mean.”

“Not Jedi and not clones, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Putting apart the fact that you are normal people, and that we are too, that it is a slippery slope to consider us different, because then the rights…”

“I know you’re fighting for us in the Senate. I know. That isn’t the question…I just mean. They were civilians. Even more civilian than usual. I have only met natural borns who are Jedi and Senators and politicians or some sort of official. This was different. And I realized how little we know about the world outside the GAR. And how little we know about societies, and species who aren’t us. They raised us for war only…” Cody was almost trembling with it. Eeth Koth put a comforting hand on his wrist and Cody continued:

“Obi-Wan, I don’t want Obi-Wan to become my teacher. It’s not his role. But if we want to have a chance outside the war, us, the vode, we need to learn about the outside world. I wanted to ask you if there was something…a way…”

Eeth Koth had totally abandoned his meal and Cody could feel the weight of his gaze, the same gaze as Obi-Wan, transcending their species.

“Let me call a few people,” the Jedi said.

**********

Years later, Cody thinks a lot about that moment. Eeth Koth joined the Force during the war and Cody has to remember this moment for the two of them, this simple moment around a table, this moment which became one of the tipping point of his life. Not the too numerous almost-death, not the many battles, not even his first kiss with his dear Obi-Wan. This moment, in Cody’s mind, is the one which changed his fate. 

Eeth Koth died not even two months after that, one among a lot of Jedi who gave their life, alongside the vode, for a chance for the galaxy and its people. Not that people are particularly thankful about it: the discovery of the Sith engineering the two sides of the conflict rocked the easy confidence of the Republic in the solidity of its system.

Democracy is never forever, if people don’t work for it.

No, democracy is only saved for now, and never will it be saved forever and ever. But that shock to the system is treated by the most intelligent of the bunch like a chance to seize. All across the reunited Republic people are working hard, entering politics, creating organizations to teach the population, to hold those in power accountable…. 

It’s a sad thing so many vode, jedi and civilians had to die and suffer for that. It’s even sadder to think it didn’t almost happen. The Republic almost burned, the Sith almost won, the beloved former Padawan of Obi-Wan Kenobi almost helped murder Mace Windu, Master of the Order...Mace Windu isn’t exactly the type to hold a grunge, but Obi-Wan still needed months after that to stay in his presence, the guilt that should have eaten Anakin transfered. 

Honestly, if Obi-Wan forgave Anakin much too quickly, and Windu too, the vod needed a much longer time. Skywalker had almost helped the man who had engineered them as slave soldiers, the man who would have wiped out their free will, the poor part of it they still had. The vod had needed a long time to forgive, and would never forget, but Cody still has the desagreable impression Rex’s anger is a most important consequence in Skywalker’s mind that the almost death of the democratic system and the almost rise of a dictatorship. 

Sometimes, late in the night, Obi-Wan stays awake, something lost in his eyes than mediation never totally makes disappear, and Cody is sure that day figures in a good part in his dark thoughts. 

Obi-Wan, and Cody too, think about what could have been. If Cody hadn’t been there that day, in the Temple, who would have been in charge of keeping an eye on Skywalker in the Council Room? No one, that who. Because Skywalker was a Council member, if a very fresh one, and there wasn’t on hand a Jedi Master with enough years to take a look at a Council Member and decide he needed baby-sitting. All those Masters were deployed, or in beds in the halls of healing. But Cody, Cody was there, and since he and his General had become an item, he had taken sometimes to act, despite what his logical brain told him, not like a soldier Anakin could order around, but like an exasperated step-father. Exasperated and concerned, as the war advanced and Anakin seemed less and less attached to his morals. 

 Who would have followed him to the Senate when Skywalker had refused to wait anymore, and tackled him at the last minute? Who would have stopped Anakin Skywalker from doing something as tremendously stupid as to save a Sith pitted against Mace Windu?

And all of that had been possible because Jocasta Nu had taken the first excuse she could to keep Cody on Coruscant that month. A well-known linguist was visiting for a series of talks, and she thought he could be a good professor for Cody, and more importantly that well-know linguist had enough political power to obtain permission for a clone following his courses.

And the Republic had lived, because Cody loved linguistics, or more because he had loved the little he understood of it at the time.

But Cody refuses to let the horrors of those years of war, and his terrible first years on Kamino, define him. He prefers to think, again and again, to that moment with Eeth Koth.

Cody didn’t know exactly what he wanted. His accelerated childhood, raised for war and war only, hadn’t given him the words for it. He just knew that for his brothers and he to have a chance after the war, they needed more. Or even more terrible horrors would certainly befall them. Soldiers without wars aren’t useful anymore, and tools with no use are only fated to be dismantled for parts.

Following Eeth Koth’s call, Jocasta Nu and her assistants had descended on the GAR with determination, great efficiency and anger that they hadn’t thought about that themselves. By dint of foraging the Jedi Archives, and every friendly archives of the galaxy, for legal precedent to help the Vode, they had forgotten all answers weren’t found between the terabytes of a datapad.

Master Nu is seated right next to Obi-Wan in the public and trying very hard to pretend her eyes aren’t misty, as Cody receives his diploma, earning himself the title of Doctor in linguistics, for his work with the forgotten Kel Dor city, right next to the first Kel Dor of said city to have made the jump to Coruscant.

Cody isn’t the first clone to finish his thesis. Not surprising:  he left the GAR years later than some of them, refusing to leave before his lover, who had been pressed into service as long as the Senate could justify it, and even longer. With Anakin leaving the Jedi Order, Obi-Wan was certainly the most famous member of it for the public, and it was as if the Senate tried to make him pay the Jedi’s refusal to abandon the vode. But Cody was the first clone Jocasta Nu talked with, when she arrived to try to help the vode not in pleading that they shouldn’t be slave soldiers, but in demonstrating they were so much more.

Cody wasn’t the first clone to leave the GAR officially, that honour went to Rex who followed Ashoka to Orto Plutonia, the first clone to be officially accepted as a member of the Jedi Corps. For what Cody understands, his life consists of almost losing his toes ten times a month, hunting with the Taz and flirting desperately with every passing skirts, as Ahsoka flirts desperately with her own Senator and supervises Republic-Taz contacts. Obi-Wan and Cody went once during permission, and Cody swore to himself that the next time Rex and Ahsoka wanted to see them, it could be on a tropical atoll.

Cody wasn’t the first clone to find a job outside of the Jedi orbit. That honour went to Fives and Tup, who left together and chose the most pacifist world they could. “We were almost separated once, never again. I’m not touching a weapon again in my life” Fives had said to Cody that day, watching Tup, busy hugging Rex, with something ferociously possessive in his eyes. Now, they have a nursery of succulent plants on a small island, in the south hemisphere of Alderaan, and Cody still isn’t sure if they are the best friends in the world, or one of those pairs who took brothers in a quite different sense, and frankly, he doesn’t care. There is a small potted thing they sent as a gift on Cody’s desk, with red undertones and white flowers once a year, but the former Commander has a black thumb, and only Obi-Wan’s careful nursing in the Force saved the poor thing already thrice.

Cody wasn’t the first clone to enter academia, that honour went to Waxer, who now teaches mathematics on Mandalore and is busy reintroducing Fett’s genes into the population with a long string of ex-partners, who still like him very much and with who he raises an army of children, at least three of them bearing a name honouring Waxer.

Cody wasn’t the first clone to marry, that honour went to Jesse and Cody isn’t touching that choice of spouse with a ten-foot pool.

Cody wasn’t the first in a lot of things. But it’s ok. He doesn’t have to lead his brothers anymore. He doesn’t have to bear responsibilities for death and help who didn’t come, and for the horrors that were their life.

The vode are free and Cody can only be a brother like any other.

He can be only Obi-Wan’s husband, even if Obi-Wan jokes that now, it’s more him that will be only the husband of Doctor Cody Kenobi, his arm candy in gatherings.

[bopinion]

2021 / 50

Aperçu of the Week:

"Home encompasses all people, no matter where they come from, what they believe, who they love. The term is meant to signal that we want to keep society together."

(Nancy Faeser, newly appointed Federal Minister of the Interior and Homeland)

Bad News of the Week:

According to a report in The New York Times, the U.S. has knowingly accepted devastating consequences for civilians in its drone war in the Middle East, which began back under Barack Obama. Confidential government files obtained by the newspaper document numerous errors in the control of air strikes that have caused thousands of civilian deaths. So much for "precision strikes against jihadists."

In the process, there was a transparency promise by the Obama administration and the real goal was to avoid collateral damage and protect both its own soldiers and civilians on all sides. In five years, there were over 50,000 remotely piloted airstrikes in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq. And not a single official report concluded that there was any wrongdoing.

Yet the NYT, after evaluating 1,311 Pentagon case reports, comes to a shocking conclusion: "The American air war has been marked by misinformation, hasty and inaccurate rocket fire and the deaths of thousands of civilians, including many children." A spokesman for the Central Command says that it regrets "every loss of innocent life," but that "even with the best technology in the world, mistakes happen." We learn once again: a guaranteed casualty of any war is always the truth.

Good News of the Week:

"The face of the country will change" headlines the leading German political weekly magazine "Der Spiegel" today. The freshly minted Super Minister for Economy and Climate Protection Robert Habeck of the Green Party wants nothing less than to transform Germans industry and infrastructure. This, he says, will create new industries and jobs - but will also demand something of the people.

A mammoth project. And there is no alternative. The fact that the governing traffic light coalition has taken up this cause is, of course, only a statement. But a credible one. The combination of economy and ecology in a newly tailored ministry alone sends out a signal. And so does the fact that a Green has become its minister. Especially since Habeck has already proven in his vita as a state minister in Schleswig-Holstein that he also knows how to implement projects in real terms. I wish him - and all of us! - much success with it.

Personal happy moment of the week:

My son has the second foreign language in high school: French. Which he can't stand. And therefore shows a - to put it mildly - "manageable motivation". The result was three F's in a row. Yes, F means failure. Since then we force him to do additional homework. A first success can be seen now: the last test was a C after all. Which does not mean that it is over now. We will have to keep the focus on French for the rest of the school year. But apparently he is now on the right track.

I couldn't care less...

...that the "right to freedom of expression" is being discussed right now. When comedian Lisa Fitz presents demonstrably false Corona death figures in her program, or liberal Bundestag Vice President Wolfgang Kubicki categorizes a possible mandatory vaccination as "revenge and retaliation" against the unvaccinated, these are not only fake news, but also simply bullshit. I am in favor of introducing a "right to intellectual hygiene" in public discourse.

As I write this...

...I am pondering whether this strange feeling in my stomach might actually be rising anxiety. Reduce social contacts, wear FFP2 mask, avoid risks and of course get vaccinated - until now you could feel reasonably safe if you did the bare minimum. And then came Omicron. With its horror reports of unprecedented infection probability, immense dark figure and frequent vaccination breakthroughs. I've been coping with restrictions and uncertainty for the nearly two years of the pandemic. But now I am seriously becoming fearful for the well-being of those most at risk in my personal environment.

Post Scriptum:

The members of the Conservative CDU have elected a new chairman. And it is an old one. Friedrich Merz was already established at the head of the party at the turn of the millennium, including as parliamentary group chairman. Who lost this post at the time to Angel Merkel. Who, in the opinion of many critics, "social-democratized" the party. Merz is therefore seen by many as a representative of a "back to the roots" of old values. This will undoubtedly sharpen the CDU's profile. Whether it will make it more electable, I doubt. After all, many points of Merz's program are clearly outdated. So, with a slightly ironic undertone, I wish him "Good luck with that!"

[tipsonunix]

Install Firefox 107 on Ubuntu / Linux Mint

This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install firefox 107 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04, and Linux Mint 21.

What is Firefox?

Firefox is a web browser that’s known for its speed, security, and customizability. Firefox is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android. When you download Firefox, you’re getting a browser that’s made by a nonprofit organization that believes in your right to privacy. We never sell your data, and we don’t follow you around the web. Firefox Features Firefox also comes with Enhanced Tracking Protection turned on by default. This means that third-party trackers are blocked from collecting your data without your permission. And if you do give a site permission to track you, Firefox will strip out your name, email address, and other personal information so you can browse anonymously. If you want even more control over your privacy, you can use Firefox’s built-in privacy tools to clear your history, cookies, and cache whenever you want. You can also set up Firefox to block all third-party cookies. Firefox 107 Changelog - Improved the performance of the instance when Microsoft's IME and Defender retrieve the URL of a focused document in Windows 11 version 22H2. - Power profiling - Various security fixes For the Complete changelog refer to the release notes

How to Install Firefox 107 on Ubuntu & Linux Mint?

Firefox can be installed on Ubuntu and Linux Mint via 4 methods. - Method 1: Via PPA - Method 2: Via SNAP - Method 3: Via Flathub - Method 4: Via Source file Install Firefox - PPA Method If you're using Ubuntu, Add the below official Firefox PPA Step 1: Add the official PPA sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa Step 2: Install Firefox by Setting the PPA Priority Without setting the PPA Priority will lead to install firefox from the SNAP package , to avoid that create a config file under preferences.d directory and add the below lines sudo nano /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozillappa Add the below lines to the mozillappa file Package: firefox* Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam Pin-Priority: 501 Step 3: Install Firefox 107 sudo apt install firefox Method 2: Via Snap Firefox can be installed from the SNAP store using the below command sudo snap install firefox Method 3: Via Flathub Step 1: Install Flatpak on your system using the setup guide Step 2: Install Firefox flatpak install flathub org.mozilla.firefox Step 3: Run Firefox flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox Method 4: Install Firefox using Tarball Step 1: Download the Firefox tarball from the Mozilla FTP website Step 2: Extract the contents of the tar package to /opt tar -xf firefox-107.0.tar.bz2 -C /opt/ Step 3: Create symbolic links and set firefox 106 as the default sudo mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox.old && sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

How to Remove Firefox Browser

If you are planning to uninstall the Firefox browser, you can uninstall it by using the below commands based on the approaches sudo apt autoremove firefox -y To Uninstall firefox from Snap use the below command sudo snap remove firefox To Uninstall firefox from flathub use the below command flatpak uninstall org.mozilla.firefox

Conclusion

From this tutorial, you have learned how to download and install the Firefox 107 browser on Ubuntu 22.04, Linux Mint, and Debian. Do let us know your comments and feedback in the comments section below. If my articles on TipsonUNIX have helped you, kindly consider buying me a coffee as a token of appreciation.

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[herpronuonsarefemslash]

Bioweapons and Beef Stew - TEASER

https://www.patreon.com/posts/52994705 Kara's pod goes into the wrong wormhole and she ends up in the Mass Effect universe. (I made it ABO so that everyone's learning new things about their bodies, which I always find fun to write. The setting is middle of the plot of Mass Effect 1 and except for Kara Zor-El, will be largely vanilla.) KUDOS NOTE: Much of the asari culture and most of the words are borrowed with my gratitude from  PMC65 of "Thessian Whisper" fame, LogicalPremise's supporting documents for his grimdark "Of Sheep and Battle Chicken" saga, and Joking611, author of "Cari'ssi'mi" stories. ----- Shepard closes the channel, leans back in her chair and pinches the bridge of her nose as hard as she dares. It feels like her sinuses are full of riot foam. Has since they took off from Noveria. "Fuck." She staggers into her cabin's bathroom and splashes cold water on her face, prodding at the rapidly purpling bruise on her right cheek from one of Benezia's wilder attacks. Spinning the clothing rack inside the tiny closet shows she has dress uniforms, her BDUs and a novelty T-Shirt she got on Elysium the night before the Blitz. Somehow it survived all the excitement and arrived by shipping pod a few weeks later, along with a promise to provide her anything in their entire line. If only she wore femme clothes with any regularity. She has a prisoner to visit and traitor or not, Benezia T'Soni requires the utmost respect. In the darkest hour of the asari, when raping, murdering queens from inland laid waste to the grand coastal cities, it was two newly minted paladins who made the midnight raid that struck down the twisted matriarch so fearsome that some claimed she was Athame's punishment. It takes no exaggeration to say that the golden age that rose in the aftermath is the daughter of Kanyru T'Sere and Cellnis T'Soni. Two tiny houses with nothing but a warrior tradition and pair of matriarchs and thousands of years later, both families are so wealthy and influential that their private navies could conquer the Terminus with ease and with a bit of luck, roll the Systems Alliance up like a carpet and lay siege to Earth. Dress uniform it is. Putting it on requires only memory. Button. Straighten. Tug. Adjust medal. Smooth sleeves. Check boots. Polish. Check again. Polish again. ... She was a quicker draw than Ashley, but not by much. Three hollow-bottle electrical rounds from her pistol knocked the matriarch out. They brought Benezia back to the Normandy in cuffs and doped to the gills. Her body blazed through the drugs almost as fast as they could pump more in her biotics working on behalf of her immune system to try to burn out the threat. Evolution doesn't allow weaklings to live to a thousand and four years old. Now, looking at a good marine--one she trained herself--standing dazed and sweaty during an easy duty shift, Shepard wonders if she brought the enemy aboard. Is indoctrination contagious? Seems unlikely that their scanners would detect it in standard decon, no matter how many nano-virus patterns they can check for. "DRAVEN! Are you operational, marine?" Draven nods again, even slower this time. "Yes...wait. No. I think I'm sick, ma'am. Fever, maybe." "I think you might be, yeah. So straight to your sleeping pod and seal yourself in. I'll send the doc." She keeps her hand squeezed tight on Draven's shoulder as she steers her towards the enlisted bunks. The door swishes open and she sees the last thing she would have expected to see: Ashley Williams wearing what looks like a very realistic cybernetic strap-on, pinning Tali's long hands against the bulkhead and rolling her hips, dragging the shaft over the suit between the young engineer's ample thighs. Tali seems to be a willing participant, judging by the way she's clenching her legs together and the lunges she makes when Ash pulls back. "Gunny!" Shepard barks. "Explain yourself." Ashley turns. Her golden skin is dripping with sweat, her curly hair is down to her shoulders, tangled and wild, and her teeth are bared. She leans

forward to cover more of Tali's body with her own and actually growls, like a dog protecting its food bowl. ... After a round of precautionary commands and instructions to Chakwas, who reported that she had already suited up in decon gear and gotten to work, Shepard swallows the last scraps of her pride and approaches the medbay door. She presses her palm to the intercom. "Can I come in, Liara?" Rather than a reply, the door simply opens. Liara's hand is slack at her side, as if lifting her finger to her omni to open the door took everything. Trails of salt granules streak her freckled face. The officer's academy didn't go deeper than 'coastal-dwelling ancestors' but seeing Liara's face streaked by sea salt and lean, delicate body and her long hands folded into a ball makes Shepard think of a mermaid in mourning more than anything. They say asari means 'of the ocean' in the salarian language that lent them their post-spaceflight name. "How is she?" Liara shrugs, looking younger and older at the same instant. "The body will live. The mind..." Something propels her forward, commands her to put her hands on Liara's shoulders. "C'mere." ... It is only a few minutes each time she wakes, so they make careful use of them. The drugs wear off every few hours and Benezia wakes for five or ten minutes as herself, then goes back to ranting. It's a slow process and knowing that Saren is anything but slow in his mad pursuit of this Conduit, it makes Shepard sick to be on a quarantined ship, even if it is with the mother of the girl she's fallen for. With the Normandy idling at a gas giant while they sort out the disease affecting the crew--they caught Draven mounting Gunnery Chief Roberts in the middle of her shift--there's plenty of time for Shepard to catch up on her paperwork from Chakwas' desk. Liara explains about Shepard's vision and gushes about melding and trying to understand it, and Benezia smirks and looks past her daughter to Shepard as if to say 'get on with it'. Shepard promises to keep Liara safe. ... Chakwas' omnitool pings and she glances down at it, says something Liara's omnitool marks as impolite, and then gradually lowers her head onto her desk, raising it and dropping it the last inch three times. "Doctor, are you..." Ill? Delirious? Suicidal? Liara wonders. Then she remembers that Tali has taken to kicking pieces of damaged technology that don't cooperate, a habit she claims she learned from Engineer Daniels. It's not a quarian gesture she's ever seen and Tali sheepishly admitted that the first two times she did it, she stubbed her toe. It's as if human emotions can gather so densely in their bodies that unless they damage themselves physically, they will go mad. "I just received word from the commander that the bioweapon has finished whatever it is doing to her." Liara's tongue feels thick. Clumsy. Too much. Like it might choke her. "Oh?" Chakwas nods. "Apparently her body has taken on masculine characteristics, at least judging by her request for altered duty clothes. I think the asari word for it is akero?" "No, but I can see why you might think that." Chakwas shrugs. "Joker wanted to name the whole mess after some popular concept in human pornography called alpha/beta/omega. All based on a fetish which is itself based on highly suspect research about Earth wolves. I suppose humans associate the dominant and forceful sexual role with the male." Liara hums. "It is a human ship, doctor. Perhaps human terms are appropriate when venturing into the unknown. Is there any way I can help the Commander?"

[peglarpapers]

What Davenport hasn’t told them, but what he hopes they have deduced, the seven of them standing buffed and burnished and bright-eyed in front of the ogling press-conference crowd, is that they are expendable.

The IPRE propaganda hails them as the best and brightest, the proverbial cream of the crop, as it were. Their young, human chronicler and bodyguard, both of them fresh-faced and prodigious. Their kindly dwarven medic with an affinity for flora, and their bumbling middle-aged necromancer. The mysterious, gorgeous twins, sharp-tongued and magically gifted, who pulled themselves out of poverty and obscurity by the tips of their elven ears and the straps of their high-heeled boots. And their captain- the ace pilot, the celebrated military tactician, the IPRE commander. The one to lead their two-sunned world into the glory of the oncoming Inter-Planar Age.

This is what the propaganda says. Davenport knows better.

He knows that this is the first mission in the history of the Institute of Planar Research and Exploration that will send living beings beyond the known planar system. He knows that the Starblaster is a hastily-constructed prototype, fully expected to fall apart after (or possibly during) its maiden voyage. The Light of Creation- its purpose, to the higher-ups of the Institute, is not to further magical or scientific knowledge, but to let them hang on to their comfortable jobs and comfortable respect and comfortable money, and to finally get them some decent fucking publicity, Davenport, so for fuck’s sake hire some interesting ones.

So, Davenport does.

Magnus Burnsides is put on the list because he is young, and handsome, and an excellent poster boy and teen heartthrob, and because he will not be missed much in the moderately-likely event of his death. At the tender age of nineteen he has no family left to mourn him, a freshly-minted degree from the Academy, and a folder that marks him as ‘enthusiastic, and loyal to a fault’. The Institute snaps him up, and Davenport snatches him for the mission only weeks later- as much as he hates the callous analysis of the Institute towards the worth of its members, he has to admit Magnus is admittedly perfect for the Starblaster crew. And he has to be honest- the first time he met Magnus, Davenport wanted him to keep that enthusiasm and joy for a little longer before he was inevitably ground down under the weight of bureaucracy and unending uniformity.

Lucretia is chosen because of her Fantasy Pulitzer in biography and her ambidexterity. The Fantasy Pulitzer helps draw in already-present fans and media attention, and Davenport just thought the ambidexterity was impressive. And considering the… eclectic personalities of the rest of his crew, twenty-year-old Lucretia with a quiet cleverness in her voice that Davenport respects might be easier to manage than the other pretentious writer-types he’d interviewed. And he admires her- her skill set is so very remarkable for somebody so young, and despite her quietness, she has potential to lead someday that he’d like to nurture, if she’ll let him.

Merle Highchurch showed up late for his interview unapologetically, beard covered in dirt and what Davenport could have sworn was a small pink cactus poking out of a pocket in his habit. His resume had been written in green gel pen. And despite all this, Davenport had hired him immediately, because the fucker had been the one person out of the hundreds he’d interviewed that Davenport thought he could go for a drink with, and possibly might not even want to stab at the end of the approaching two-month mission. There was something about the irreverent cleric that made you feel secure, and gods if that isn’t a feeling Davenport craves.

The twins had been… a godsend, if Davenport was being honest. Aside from Taako and Lup’s being almost unnaturally good candidates for tabloid bait (what cheap fantasy magazine didn’t want to tell a story about the sweet little elf boy and girl who overcame the tragic circumstances of their childhood and grew up to become glamourous, internationally famous inter-dimensional cosmonauts?), they could provide something the Starblaster needed desperately- fuel for the bond engine. It’s not like the thing could thrive off of the relationships between co-workers. There was no situation in which both of the twins would have been chosen otherwise- skill sets too similar, independence levels too high, too likely to prioritise each other over the mission. But Davenport bribed and blackmailed and cajoled, as he’d done before and would undoubtedly do again, and Taako and Lup continued to gain notoriety, and Davenport’s superior officer thankfully reached a point close enough to retirement that he was willing to sign any document placed in front of him if it let him get back to his nap and the brandy hidden in his desk drawer, and by the time launch day rolled around the twins were strutting along the deck with the rest of the crew.

Barry was…the exception to the rule. They hadn’t wanted him on a possible suicide mission- not Professor Hallwinter, not the first man they’d called in to tell them whether the Light of Creation was actually alive or not, not the one who’d looked upon the closest thing to the face of the gods they had upon that two-sunned planet and said huh. Well, it’s not not alive. No, they’d wanted him on the third ship out, maybe the fourth, surrounded by bodyguards more experienced than a teenager with scraggly sideburns. But Barry… he’d never been much of a fighter, the pudgy human in the bluejeans, but fuck if he hadn’t disarmed those old bastards at the Institute. Davenport had never been one for genial shuffling in badly-fitting clothes, or good-natured scientific conversation- nor was he able to hide fiery determination behind a quiet, bumbling mask. But Barry charmed his way onto that ship in ten minutes flat, once he set his mind to it, and Davenport had never been more grateful.

And Davenport?

He’s here to prove them all wrong.

All of them who said that he, a dull little gnome who came from fucking nothing couldn’t hack it, couldn’t do anything- anything- he set his mind to. He’s proving that it all paid off, all the late nights studying with purloined textbooks, flying anything and everything he could get his hands on, whenever he could get his hands on it, failing the IPRE Flight Academy’s entrance exam four times before he got in. He’s going to make sure that everyone knows the captain of the Starblaster mission isn’t an IPRE higher-up, the rich son of a bureaucrat or a businessman. They’re going to know that he worked for it against a system designed to keep out all but a select few. That he fought for it all and he won.

And, quite honestly? He’d picked his crew not for their ability to charm the press, or from desire to keep them away from IPRE headquarters, or even their various scientific skillsets (though those certainly helped). No, he’d chosen them because they were underdogs, every one of them. They’d wrestled with the world for their entire lives to get to where they were today, clawed their way out of their respective pits and made it, and they were still considered expendable.

Well, not on Davenport’s fucking watch.

After the press conference, after the biker bar and the purple sky leaching itself of colour and the opalescent plane descending, after their world with its two glowing suns is consumed and they make their frantic escape, after they decide to survive, Davenport stands on the deck and looks out at the empty space between planes.

And he is glad, despite everything. Because he knows he has chosen well. And that there is no crew better equipped to endure the storm to come.